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MIT Project Reveals What PRISM Knows About You
judgecorp writes "MIT's Immersion project sifts your Gmail, and constructs a map of your associations. Without opening a single message, it gives a clear view of who you connect with. It's a glimpse of some of what the NSA PRISM can do. From the article: 'You can assume that if the NSA is looking at your email, the information in Immersion is similar to what they will see. Consider that they probably see all of your email addresses (and not just Gmail) and that the metadata is examined along with the metadata from everyone you’ve corresponded with, and you can see just how much can be inferred from this data alone.'"
So...
Is it not OK that the NSA is doing, but OK that MIT is doing it?
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Uh... Your email is plain te t. Th NSA has a fuckton more than just metadata... They have your entire contents.
What now? Are they water-boarding people for information?
Have gnu, will travel.
Jon Corzine Off The Hook
After 18 months of investigation, the criminal probe against Jon Corzine has been dropped. He will not be facing criminal charges for the misuse of investors' funds at MF Global. Civil charges have been filed against Corzine.
Yet, somehow, the Republicans are "the Party of Wall Street."
This decision makes sense. After all, if the government were to uphold the law and prosecute people for wantonly (and probably illegally) pissing away other people's millions of dollars and lying about what they did/knew/allowed, they'd have to start by filing charges against Choom Boy and all of Congress.
Corzine is an absolute friggin' piker compared to President Historic First©.
I always thought it would be interesting way to figure out a way to seed surveillance and information gathering networks with unique information you could then watch for to see where it "leaks out". For all the worry about NSA surveillance, my real fear is that is that it's actually a front for commercial operations. (My theory is that the NSA is mostly a headless monster of a "Security Industrial Complex" that lives off of milking the public for money in exchange for useless services and general industrial espionage. It's really the perfect scam because you can avoid any investigation of conflict of interest with 'state secrets' privilege) It would be a real coup to find your honeypot information leaking in to commercial databases.
More than a decade ago I registered a few domains with bogus names. To this day I still get offers in the mail for "Longdong McPorksword", even though mining whois data for commercial purposes has always been supposedly illegial (well, a terms of service violation at least)
Their analysis comes up completely blank.
Why?
Because I use POP3 rather than the bullshit IMAP for my mail access. There is nothing on the server, so there is nothing to analyze.
So the purpose of this is what? To reassure us that the NSA is telling the truth and that they really do only view metadata? I think at this point it is quite safe to assume that any official announcement from the NSA is a lie. If MIT really wants to simulate seeing what the NSA can see then they should give you a view of every form of online communication plus any voice communication. The content. Not just the fucking metadata.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Wolfram Alpha does similar analysis with your Facebook data. Those bubble charts reveal some amazing insights on seemingly insufficient amounts of data.
Ask me how the Heisenberg Principle may or may not have saved my life.
The Immersion Project is PRISM... nice
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Again, I am not very concerned if Google thinks I may want to buy Pampers, Depends, or both.
Iam concerned with government wondering who I talk with who may be political. As it turns out, no one. But many people do do this, and some of them would be of interest to corrupted officials.
Therefore this mechanism, if it is to exist, needs good logging and forbearance mechanisms without warrant or, if in an "emergency", logging with mandatory followup with FISA or other court, and regular review by Congress.
"It's such an emergency we can't even do that after 12 years" that is the fraudulent, anti-freedom activity.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
last week
they also know i follow the NYC sports teams and the email alerts i receive from fatwallet and slickdeals
along with my ereaderIQ author alerts for kindle books price drops
that's why i didn't buy that Orson Scott Card book over the weekend. the NSA would have found out
Aaannnd it's Slashdotted.
Help I am stuck in a signature factory!
The contraposition of this story with the fate of John Corzine deserves to be highlighted.
Here we have the a US intelligence agency, saying it needs to snoop on millions in a supposed effort to protect them from threats. And yet John Corzine, who openly stole customers money, is not being prosecuted, despite the reams and reams of records and evidence against him and MFGlobal.
What we see here is that information does not correllate with prosecutions, or effectiveness at protecting people from harm.
May the Maths Be with you!
The power of an integrating capability isn't what it can glean from ONE source (gmail), but rather the cross product of combining MULTIPLE sources. (gmail, facebook, phone records, credit report, amazon purchases? banking transactions?...) This cross-cutting capability is really the only portion that is unique/specific to government. (Except there is also a vast and shadowy industry of buying and selling the same personal information on private markets which we also know very little about).
the people i am closest to i do not talk with online
The tool shows what the NSA could know about you if they had access to your gmail. However, Google rather staunchly maintains that the NSA does not have any access to Google user data, with the exception of specific information about specific individuals when proper legal documentation has been provided and reviewed by Google's legal team, and even then the NSA does not have access to Google's servers; Google retrieves the specific data requested by the order and delivers it to the requestor.
In addition to the previous public statements, David Drummond just published the following op-ed in faz.net (in German): http://www.faz.net/aktuell/wirtschaft/unternehmen/gastbeitrag-von-david-drummond-gleichgewicht-zwischen-sicherheit-und-buergerrechten-12272710.html. Here's a Google+ post that contains an English translation: https://plus.google.com/u/0/105603626919803672092/posts/bT7ndyhJmUk
Unless Google is flat-out lying of course. I don't believe that is true; I don't think Google could be legally compelled to lie, and I don't think the CEO and legal counsel legally can lie to the public, but you have to make your own evaluation on that point.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
You can trust MIT exactly as far as you can throw any one of their buildings. MIT employs the most despicable state propagandist in US history, Noam Chomsky. Chomsky is the US equivalent of the UK's Tony Benn- a vile extremist ultra-high level operative of the government who passes himself off as the 'man of the people' and 'independent' critic of government policy. Chomsky actually sits on Israel's so-called 'star chamber', a shadowy organisation that pretends to find 'moral' authority for Israel's acts of terrorism across the globe.
The spying on the US population is far more extensive than even the most informed of you realise. For instance, betas are told that vehicles are tracked by license plate identifying camera systems, but this is a purposeful smokescreen. 99.99% of all tracking is done using under-surface RFID readers that monitor the chips present in every vehicle tire. The cameras exist merely to associate a 'name' with the current 'fingerprint' of your tire RFID chips. Under-surface readers are thousands of times cheaper, and thousands of times more reliable than camera systems, allowing a nation-wide network of deployment to a degree none of you can even comprehend.
The RFID tracking of vehicles is combined with the perfect ral-time tracking of EVERY cell phone currently receiving power (does your phone have a charged battery?- then it is being tracked).
A would-be car bomber in the USA was captured combining these two spy methods. The bomber bought a pay as you go phone in one town (with cash) and used it once in another town. This alone allowed him to be caught. How? By using RFID vehicle records to match a vehicle present in both locations at the time of purchase, and at the time the phone was used once. The very method the bomber thought made him anonymous allowed him to be identified.
US TV shows are no longer allowed to point out to viewers that ALL cell phones are tracked by the phone company and government constantly in real-time. It is LAW that every phone have this 'GPS' like functionality, but no show is allowed to have a plot that revolves around this fact.
The NSA slurps up EVERY piece of electronic data. Crap about 'meta' data is just that. The US post-office actually photographs (where possible) the CONTENTS of all ordinary mail (the piece of mail is exposed to extremely bright light of a frequency most likely to capture the interior writing on the pages within- a method that works more often than you may expect). Of course, persons of interest actually have their post opened and inspected. In the UK, this was once done by inserting a high-speed spinning needle into the base of the envelope to remove the contents with minimal external damage.
Your phone calls (contrary to MIT lies) are all recorded. Same with your Emails, etc. MIT is engaged in a usual propaganda operation based on standard FUD methods. The Meta-data crap is just nonsense for VERY dim-witted sheep (the lie goes like this - "the meta data looked suspicious, so then, and only then, we started capturing the actual data").
Do you know what the worst aspect of all this is? Well, yes, it is really the 1984 implications, but what I meant to say is that the very methods of spying allow the real criminals to circumvent the surveillance. Understand how vehicle and phones are tracked, and a smart operative will NOT make the same mistake as that bomber I mentioned earlier. The very effectiveness of NSA spying produces whole new classes of methods to avoid discovery or lay down trails of false and misleading information.
Of course, NSA spying has NOTHING to do with finding the 'bad guys'. It is a project to discover information that can be used to 'coerce' people of influence, and it is a project to read the mind of the populace in real-time, so control propaganda methods (of the sort Noam Chomsky helps create- using language to manipulate Humans is his field of study) used by the mainstream media can be better perfected.
Ran the demo, big whoop...
If you visit the page using Firefox with JavaScript disabled, they suggest you to download Google's Chrome, i.e. to give even more of your data to NSA. We should at least recommend Chromium (the open-source part of Chrome) in such cases instead of the binary distribution from Google.
0 collaborators
87 emails
I think PRISM know a LOT more about me than that.
At least the NSA says it doesn’t read the contents of your email. Google does, and it admits that it does.
Like I believe NSA does not look at the contents... If it weren't for Snowden, we would still not know about PRISM.
I allowed Immersion to review my gmail, and I don't think it really reflects what PRISM is accessing in any way. All it did was go through my emails and build a standard social network map out of my emails based on who was in the address lines. My understanding is that PRISM is actually analyzing the content of my emails. Immersion is neat, but it really seems like the developers are trying to promote their own software by attaching it to the surveillance scandal.
As for Immersion itself. It is a neat application and it's fun to see a chart of everyone you interact with an how they are all networked together. If you're interested in seeing your Facebook and Twitter networks modeled in a similar way, you can use the open-source NodeXL plugin for Excel, which let's you harvest your data from these social networks and build your own visualizations. It's actually much much more robust than Immersion and you don't have to give a third-party access to your accounts since you run it from your local machine yourself.
i ~ Celebrating Science, Cyberspace, Speculation
"The problem" is that PRISM is only authorized by Section 702 of the FISA Amendment Act of 2008, which only covers non-US Persons outside of the United States.
Not only that, but the US previously DID have an internet metadata collection program, which was discontinued in the face of internal questions about its lack of effectiveness on balance with the potential for abuse and privacy intrusion. You know, the oversight system working like it's supposed to, however imperfectly.
But you don't care about any of this...you have already decided that NSA is collecting everything, everywhere, all the time...even though this is patently illegal and unconstitutional. (Insert, "But the phone metadata collection is unconstitutional!" here. No, it's not, because right or wrong, for better or worse, metadata collection of any kind has been found to not constitute a search under the Fourth Amendment under current law and case law. If we want that to be different, we need to change the law.)
...a lot of rich Nigerians, quite a few Viagra and p. enlargement sellers, a number of individuals who know jobs that pay thousands of dollars that you can do from home, a handful of real estate executives, and more.
But they can't block spammers?
Or botnets?
Now you too can put a sign on your back that says 'rape me'.
But wait there's more!! Those that rape your identity will find a way to monetize it!!@
At least the NSA says it doesn’t read the contents of your email. Google does, and it admits that it does.
Like I believe NSA does not look at the contents... If it weren't for Snowden, we would still not know about PRISM.
Only if you are a fool.
I mean, seriously... how useful can these association models really be when you get so much Chinese spam and phishing mails with Office attachments every day?
At least the NSA says it doesn’t read the contents of your email.
Of course they say NSA doesn't read the contents of your mail or listen to your phone conversations. That's why they hire contractors to do the dirty work.
Stop and listen to what the government officials say and doesn't say. No mention of what the contractors are doing only that NSA isn't reading your mail.
I once worked as a post office counter clerk. It somebody exchanged money and we felt uneasy in any way, we were told to tell them the money would take a week to process. That was a lie. Giving a suspect any clue that they are under suspicion was against the law, and had consequences. So the official printed handbook told us we had to lie, or else. Of course they never used the word "lie" - nobody ever sees their own lies as lies.
We already knew about PRISM since 2006. Or rather, we knew about the giant government wiretapping program that worked in conjunction with telecoms to steal our data. There was a lawsuit and a documentary about the whole thing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
Snowden isn't a hero. If he only revealed PRISM, I'd root for him, but his disclosures about Stuxnet, hacking against China, etc. make me think that the guy is just a deluded, self-important loon who gives zero shits about America.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
It's a community, after all
As creepy as it is, it was fascinating to see that the analysis it ran on my recipients was totally accurate. It knew who people were by how I knew them better than I did. Groups like family were in different colors. It was a detailed overhead view of my little personal electronic world.
Why should I trust some guys from MIT with my GMail password?
You can make your Gmail (or any other message sent) by using cryptography apps, that can change your message into one that can not be understandable without knowing the key.
I feel pretty sure that cryptography apps that I've found on an Android Market can make my conversations and privacy safe. Try this https://play.google.com/store/search?q=jinvention&c=apps
with an unknown target you want be able search content for keywords, phrases or any other exploitable information that would suit your purpose. When key data that you are looking for is found, prism would then create a database on the target (all available electronic data to start with). This database would include all known contacts and provide links to those contacts related to the key information found in the primary search. the user could then proceed to build databases on the primary targets contacts..bits of data are like dots on a piece paper, connect the dots and you build a profile of the target. you should have enough information to approach your target and do what you will.