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NSA Officers Sometimes Spy On Love Interests
Jah-Wren Ryel writes "The latest twist in the NSA coverage sounds like something out of a dime-store romance novel — NSA agents eavesdropping on their current and former girlfriends. Official categories of spying have included SIGINT (signals intelligence) and HUMINT (human intelligence) and now the NSA has added a new category to the lexicon — LOVEINT — which is surely destined to be a popular hashtag now."
Really is anyone surprised?
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
I had to do a SIGINT on previous girlfriends too.
Nobody breaks office policies
"Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely." -- Lord Acton
Humans pursuing their petty little human needs when noone is looking? YOU DON'T SAY!
Separation of power was not thought up by idiots, you know.
Of course it runs NetBSD. BTC: 1NT7QvbetmANwaMzhpVL6
They must have been foreign girlfriends, so what is the problem?
Bert
I guess there's no one spying on their boyfriends at the NSA then.
Don't worry about the government spying on you, it may just be that special someone listening to all your calls.
Didn't Harry Tasker invent LOVEINT?
Spying on love interests is one thing, but spying on innocent children to plan sexually assaulting them is a different category. It's happened before, and I don't understand how people can still defend these monstrous surveillence activities.
Why won't someone think of the children when it's finally appropriate?
Us, us, us, us, us.... and them, them, them, them, them... after all, we're all just ordinary men...
So ladies, that boyfriend you have, the one with the steady career in government, who seemed to understand you like no man ever had before...
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
No need to worry. US presidents don't lie. Especially not the Nobel Peace prize winning ones. So it's Ok. Because if you can't trust the government... Well then we really are really screwed.
Most of the incidents, officials said, were self-reported. Such admissions can arise, for example, when an employee takes a polygraph tests as part of a renewal of a security clearance.
Which is exactly what you'd expect if the probability of getting caught is close to zero and the true number of cases is much larger.
And it seems that the boys who work at Ft. Meade may have
been breaking this law.
Of course they are above the law, aren't they ? Time will tell, just
as it did with Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels, Goering, and the rest.
In each instance, the employee was punished either with an administrative action or termination.
termination ? you keep using that word ...
Well, I would, if my girlfriend were Jamie Lee Curtis. 20 Years ago.
Corrupt is as corrupt does. They've already demonstrated a profound moral bankruptcy and a willingness to collectively serve only themselves, this just a matter of scale.
...
And that's why birds do it, bees do it
Even Tommy Lees do it
Let's do it, let's spy on love...
(With apologies to Cole Porter)
But what about intercepting phone sex calls of troops with their loved ones? And not just intercepted, shared between them when the conversation was hot.
And they did that with soldiers, in an environment where their superiors were more or less aware of what they were doing, so they restricted themselves in what they could do. What kind of respect you can expect from them? What kind of respect should they (as people and as institutions) deserve?
Oh, this is for your safety, so all is justified, except that the most monitored countries includes China, Russia, France, Germany, Japan, and Brazil, This is more about starting a war (and/or stealing IP) than defending from terrorists.
"Most of the incidents, officials said, were self-reported." So their "significant care to prevent any abuses" consists primarily of "tell us when you've done something bad."
If they actually had strong internal checks in place, the majority of abuses would be detected by those systems, not by self reporting.
The Scientologists do it even worse. Hundreds of hours of polygraph testing, where you're compelled to reveal your crimes and thoughts against your superiors, and it's all recorded and sent to the central offices, the "Sea Org", where it is used against you by the "Guardian Office" to "dead agent" you if you ever rebel. These practices were all well documented in the book "the Scandal of Scientology", whose author was so abused by the cult that the founder's wife, Mary Sue Hubbard, and her minions went to jail for it.. Other cult members who've left since then have testified to the continuing abuse of these "auditing" materials by current members of the cult.
Have your friend from Saudi Arabia call your girlfriend, or anyone for that matter. Wide open door.
I didn't mean to be so correct.
I keep saying setting rules agents "are supposed to follow" isn't good enough, and should be constitutionally invalid in the computer age.
The rules against warrantless searches have to do with political spying, not mundane spying, even on girlfriends by jackasses. If they can get away with this, operatives working for someone powerful can get away with tapping an opponent's phones.
They need security software that cannot be bypassed that logs everything in incorruptible logs for future review, and auto-stored at multiple sites without delete communication (someone at any given site cannot send out a signal to alter or delete logs at other sites.)
This is not technically that hard to do but it needs to be done.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Right now the NSA analyze the communications of people three or less degrees of separation from person of interests. Obviously the simplest proactive fix would be implement rules automatically enforced by the computers that prevent employees or contractors from accessing any information from anyone with three or less degrees of separation from themselves. It's easy to implement, the fact they didn't and don't just show NSA's upper management is not really interested in stopping these practices.
"administrative action or termination." ...OR termination? Every single one of them should have been fired at the least. If I looked up an ex girlfriend on the electronic medical record system I'm logged into right now, I would be subject to a $50,000 dollar fine and a year in prison even after being fired ( AMA HIPAA penalties page). This kind of abuse of access to privileged information similar to a HIPAA violation, except double illegal since most of the surveillance has no legal basis either.
BULLSHIT! You are an unethical pervert if you look at another person's email without their explicit consent. When I was doing email systems administration and/or migration projects sometimes it was necessary to examine the format of some of the messages flagged as corrupt to ensure the recovery tool had fixed the issue if possible. I scanned the appropriate messages for format but never remembered the actual content even in those case where reading the entire content of the message was necessary. I held myself to a much higher ethical and professional standard.
none I know..
Dallas Real Estate
And nobody does it better...
This isn't a "latest twist in the NSA saga". It's a transparent PR fluff piece.
Obviously the PR division at the NSA figured out a plan to trivialize the revelations. John DeLong at his press conference comes out with "Oh yes, once or twice in the past decade we have broken the rules, but it's been for lighthearded laughable trivial matters like LOVEINT. Ha ha ha, what a joke. My bad. We're all good now, right?"
Of course the media will lap this up. And it distracts attention from the real systematic unconstitutional behavior of the NSA, and the fact that the NSA's overseers themselves believe their oversight to be inadequate.
Still just a distraction from STOCKINT. Follow the money. The first time I considered such massive surveillance, front-running market events was what came to mind. This is just like anything else in politics. Get people thinking about sex to distract them from the real crimes.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Clinton murdered plenty of people in a cruise missile attack in Sudan - US reaction - Yawn.
Clinton had consensual sex with a willing female - US Reaction - Impeach, impeach, impeach.
How is this possible after all oversight NSA goons and political stooges get on TV and tell us is going on?
If Obama can arrange to have his dog Bo airlifted to Martha's Vineyard , he can arrange to visit with the NSA to make sure they're following the rules.
C'mon, Mr Prez!
Why do I need to monitor all of the communications, when Facebook will tell me where she will be and who she was with? OKCupid tells me more about a person than a job interview or dating.
Anything else that Rush is talking about that we need to hear about at least twenty more times?
Wow. "Every Breath You Take" was NEVER more true (and creepy) than now.
Shiver
-
Teenage boys are horny. Film at 11:00.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha.
But seriously, why does this remind me of the scene in Men in Black where K is using the organization's equipment to keep tabs on his old girlfriend.
You've got guys listening in on ex-wives, dropping in on calls from soldiers overseas, checking out what movie stars are up to...
Now, to be fair, a lot of this (as others have pointed out) is just what you would expect from a group of people given that kind of power, but the details match up so perfectly, I wonder if Sorkin was tipped off by someone.
How Senator Mitch McConnell got his information about Ashley Judd's private medical data for a slander campaign; and not see a corollary of the humanity that is the NSA?
...is a geek supposed to get a girlfriend?
NASA Scientists Plan to Approach Girl by 2018
Incipiamus, fratres, servire Domino Deo, quia hucusque vix vel parum in nullo profecimus.
Intelligence gathering on foreign markets is not only legal by design, it is in the spirit of the law as well. When the common man thinks of national security, they think of politics and military work. The real bread and butter of a country is its actual bread and butter.
Economic power has greater effects than any other. An added benefit is it is (mostly) bloodless. A government looking after its citizens before all others as a justification for existence has a duty to give its citizens an economic advantage with whatever resources it has available. It can come in the form of trade negotiations, treaties, road networks, employment regulations, tariffs, and even intelligence gathering.
Of course the devil is in the details, nonetheless- spying, leveraging, and controlling foreign markets for local advantage is a huge part of why international government relations exists instead of constant violent conflict. It isn't fair to all people, yet I am glad for what it has mostly displaced.
Here we have a standard black propaganda psy-op, dressed as a humiliating 'revelation' to the sheeple. The ploy is an ages old one. Trivialise an issue (even while actually confirming the scale and scope of the abuses) so everything takes on a 'tabloid' flavour, and can be soon forgotten as 'tabloid' coverage soon gets bored and moves on to the next 'scandal'. It is straight from the Edward Bernays' playbook (and if you don't know who Bernays was, you should be pretty ashamed of yourself).
The NSA does FULL surveillance, and grabs every piece of communication currently possible. ALL emails. ALL phonecalls. Shills try to mislead by asking you what possible use such data could have. However, 'use' is very much a secondary issue- and is the focus of constant data-mining R+D. The experts that examine the data (the people you NEVER see discussed in these NSA stories) are very much interested in societal trends- both current and historical. They wish to deliver revelations to their masters about how ordinary people, en masse, think and respond.
NSA full surveillance spying allows the following:
1) reading the current mindset of the general population, or defined subsets, to allow the maximum effectiveness of propaganda campaigns, especially those that run in the mainstream media (eg., the anti-secular Syria, pro-extremist radical terrorist one we see playing out today)
2) the identification of emerging grass-roots ('bottom-up') activism, groups and potential leaders, for either co-opting or extermination (take out people/groups when they are just beginning to act, and there is little chance of wider public back-lash). And to counter the usual shills here, 'extermination' almost never means murder, but bringing the full weight of state harassment on the people, family and friends involved. Most people simply back-down under such pressure.
3) collecting blackmail material for use against those that may find themselves in positions of power or influence. A single identified act of infidelity, for instance, allows the NSA to provide information to their masters that can be used to win the 'support' from the individual involved for some political cause or other.
The NSA is about accumulation of power. Think of it like an electronic mega-fortress that your masters build for themselves, and then perpetually rule you from, safe from attack from either the sheeple, or other different forces that might also seek to rule over the sheeple.
The only counter would be 21st Century additions to the US Constitution, specifically criminalising all forms of full surveillance activities by the State, regardless of excuse. This isn't going to happen, because the US. like other great nations, is actually ruled by 'non-partisan' (hoho) star chambers that exist under the excuse of 'continuity' and 'consensus'. These star chambers adore the power provided by the growing NSA full surveillance projects. The star chambers operate above the visible government and court system (although, of course, senior members from both participate in various star chambers). And above the star chambers themselves are the people really working to pull the strings of Human History. Those that are planning to set in motion the great conflict between the US, Russia and China. Why do you think the US is becoming an ever more vicious warmongering nation day-by-day?
If Obama can arrange to have his dog Bo airlifted to Martha's Vineyard
It isn't like the 2nd helicopter was only for the dog. It was carrying all the personnel and equipment that didn't fit in the first helicopter with the president.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Persons were accessing data they were not authorized to access.
When are the criminal charges to be filed?
After your spanking here http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4117625&cid=44642607 and here too http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4117625&cid=44647137 and you ran from both.
Can we just get to the part of the movie where Jamie Lee Curtis dances? I wonder if any of the NSA geeks knows how to fly a Harrier?
People are curious, people want power, people want control
That's what they would like you to believe, because their real objective is even more despicable. The goal of a spy state (or any police state in general) is profit. Power is merely a stepping stone on the road to riches, a tool used for a job. Their profit is never taken directly, of course, but obfuscated through a variety of perfectly legal methods (they are the same ones who invent the laws, of course).
Follow the money. When evaluating the actions of government, always follow the money first.
The hypocrisy of the /. crowd it quite stunning : most of them would do exactly the same if given the chance.
I believe you're tarring yourself there more than your intended targets. I've never given a rat's ass about co-workers' or supervisors' personal secrets or private lives. I very much doubt that anyone who chooses tech for a career would find that cruft the least bit interesting. If you do, you might find reality TV more entertaining than /.
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
The spying on love interests angle was obviously coming down the pipe. I can't wait to read when it hits the news that these creeps are abusing their positions for financial interests as well.
It's not insider trading if you're "inside" due to national security concerns, right?
Coming soon ... SEXINT for all of the NSA's porn.
Every industry does this. If there is easy access to sensitive data, workers with that access often use it.
There have been times when telecom workers access their "significant other's or Ex-SO's voicemail and this is a highly regulated industry. In the cellular world, access to private data happens all the time both for good reason and for personal interest - cell networks are not regulated much at all.
Working at ISPs, I know people snooped on emails. As a young email admin, I looked out of curiousity. In the last 15 yrs, I have NOT looked unless required to do so for my job. It is better to know know things that you shouldn't know.
As a network and server admin many, many, years ago at a company growing from 20-3000+ employees, I found the spreadsheet that had a summary of all corporate salaries and stock option grants. I looked and actually felt good about it - the company was fair in my opinion for both salaries AND option grants. BTW, I was just a team leader there, so more like 1st line management. Seeing that the owners salaries were $20K/yr less than mine was encouraging - of course, they had real stock, not just options, and they were paid end-of-year bonuses from the excess profits. The best performers were paid accordingly. Anyway, I let the HR manager know about the file permissions and suggested that he NOT store it on a network drive where everyone in the company could review it. We never spoke about it again. BTW, even his salary was not out-of-line for the work he did. How often would an network admin say that about their HR team?
So, if any industry doesn't mandate controls for private information, it will be abused. Even with controls, there will always be a small group of uber nerds with pretty much complete access to all data. For most industries, encrypting databased per-record just isn't worth the effort and that is the only way to prevent the sort uber-nerd access.
Don't worry, all of the analysts doing the LOVEINT eavesdropping have proper credentials. Their IDs all say "McLovin."
It isn't like the 2nd helicopter was only for the dog. It was carrying all the personnel and equipment that didn't fit in the first helicopter with the president.
Good thing he canceled Whitehouse tours given to school children otherwise the country might have to go into debt paying for his vacation luggage copters.
That was a nice attempt to make yourself look sympathetic. If you could now stop killing your POWs and doing random, worldwide kidnappings. You will never be able to outdo the NKVD, despite all your best efforts.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/66th_Military_Intelligence_Brigade#Misconduct_in_the_past
... they also get excellent financial "advice" from all the best sources.
No, we don't. Only those megalomaniacs inclined to do so, do so. If you're reading your employees emails outside the purview of systems security or spying on your staff, then you're simply a bad person - a lot of people are, to be sure, but that by no means makes your group normal. You're the folks who the rest of us call "the bad guys". No amount of trying to convince you that all other IT staff are the same actually makes it true. Because there's no such thing as karma and the universe isn't geared towards personalities, life *is* actually tougher if you're a person of good character. Most 'successful' people aren't. Hence why most IT nerds stay IT nerds - and don't spy on their co-workers.
Why not go for the child porn angle? They take ALL our conversations and data, and pass them on to the highest bidder. And the next highest bidder. And the next.
Think about that.
The NSA willfully engages in the for-profit creation [capturing and putting together data that would not otherwise have been as such] and mass-distribution of child pornography.
Even if we can't get them for the racketeering, terrorism, espionage, blackmail, complicity in assassinations, and all the other shit they do, then maybe we can at least get every last one of those fuckers behind bars for exchanging photos of diddling kids.
I agree with quite a bit of your post, and the most of the things I disagree with, I believe are rational positions that I can agree somebody reasonable can hold even if I don't. But you led off with the single thing that I take exception to.
Sorry. No. That IS NOT what the debate is over.
The debate is over what right people have to privacy from their government.
B) Eliminate all the stupid users. This is frowned upon by society.
Well, given what you do for a living, it's understandable you'd want to be with someone who uses the same methods for her job.
well, technically a "white" man can be on of many various shades of pink and/or tan/olive** in skin color, and a "black" man's skin can range from a very pale beige to nearly jet-black. An Asian man's skin isn't really yellow at all (unless something like jaundice is involved).
"African American" could just as easily describe a pale blue-eyed dude from South Africa as it could a dude with jet-black skin from Rwanda or a more Arabic-looking gent from Egypt. QED: The term is ignorant at best. "Caucasian" is a holdover from days when scientists thought that pale folks all stemmed from folks who lived in the Caucasus region of the world, as you half-stated. IMHO, the only term that even halfway seems to fit would be "Native American", but as a group, they all emigrated from Asia about 100k years ago, and as time goes by even that particular distinction will fuzz and fade.
It would just be easier to call 'em all "people" and be done with it, no? I figure in about 500 years (assuming civilization holds up that long), skin color will be too blended and mixed to even hope to tell any differences by mere sight.
FYI: I'm currently typing this missive while on business in Atlanta, Georgia; I've seen nearly every shade of skin color in the past 24 hours. I've seen folks getting along in social situations just fine, the participants individually bearing radically differing skin colors. I grew up under similar circumstances, and I can tell you that Obama is very inept, very ideological, very selfish, and a very lousy president; not one of the worst, but pretty close to it.
** BTW, maybe we can just call 'em pink?
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
You are obviously entirely incapable of becoming a soldier.
They are made up of human beings. And human beings invariably abuse the system. It is not preventable. If information is collected, it WILL be abused. 100% certainty.
Oh yeah, and my tax dollars at work. Huzzah!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
What is the source of that information? Snowden leak? NSA PR? Other?
Jealousy gets people, its too damn powerfull. Strong enough to make people kill each another, and strong enough to eat a person alive, and force them to do stuff like spyiing on his partner. If you have attended a hackers irc channel, is very common the visit of some male asking for help to "restore the hotmail password" of his girlfriend, and stuff like that. They want to check if his girlfriend is cheating them.
I mean, the point of it all was that no domestic intelligence was being collected, right? So all those emps checking up on gfs must have been foreign, right? After all, metadata isn't private or anything, right?
There is this guy called Snowdon that worked for a private contractor in Hawaii which was doing outsourced work for the NSA. The US government has been treating him as if he had "total and full access."
The hypocrisy of the /. crowd it quite stunning : most of them would do exactly the same if given the chance.
No. You don't get to decide what other people would do if they were put in a different situation and then decide that they're hypocritical because of the actions they took in your delusions.
I've worked almost daily with direct access to my company's HR database for years. I needed said access to write queries for web applications. Had I wanted to, I could have easily looked up anyone's salary, birth dates, SSN's, home addresses, etc. I never have, though. Partly because I'd be fired if found out (and I'm awful at keeping secrets), but partly because I know that accessing that information for that reason would be wrong.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Oh man, this would be such a sweet job! Trawl around for a while to see if I could spot the odd domestic terrorist/tax evader to keep Amurica safe and then in my "spare time", keep tabs on that hottie living down the street from me, like where she buys her coffee, how her current relationships are going etc. Then I can check through the email history of a few of my favorite company CEOs to see what stocks I should be buying/selling.
It's really hard to see a downside.
Got to sell Got to sell.
NSA will be 'rigging' trading on NASDQ on Monday. Get ready! NSA ass-whipes RULE the RUE.
Viagra enema's for everyone!
YawHooo.
He worked at a contractors site on an island not some huge government building in Virginia or Utah. The shambolic mess is a watering can with dozens of holes to leak from. Given that modern subs are mainly in the role of communications interceptions it's also a pretty insane idea to pipe secret stuff to that contractors site in Hawaii. Since they are fucking everything else up how do we know that their own transmissions are encrypted and not in the clear thus vunerable to something put opportunisticly on a cable during an outage? There are windows of up to several days between when cables break and they are repaired.
No, I'm saying we hit that point of using intelligence agents for political advantage with Nixon and Watergate, but there have also been worse incidents since (eg. recently the turf war between the FBI and CIA which resulted in the removal of the CIA head on "moral" grounds from misused intelligence). Another is Hillary demanding agents obtain credit card details of diplomats so that they could be framed to apply pressure (not supposition, that reason was given in the order). I'm sure you remember a few others. Politics isn't just something that happens at election time according to the dictionary.
Yes. The dog walker, and the kennel.
Hopefully he will take his dog with him when he visits, and hopefully it has lots of sharp teeth.
Wasn't Obama supposed to be the guy offering "hope and change"?
That's one election promise he actually kept. You can't deny that you actually got hope for improvement and a change to the worse.
It's a shame everyone missed the obvious lead-in this article has provided. Unauthorized agent activity will now be known as...
Prism Jism
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
The way to protect our country is to do real intelligence, find out what the rest of the world is thinking, and go after the basic causes.
If the rest of the world is thinking something different from Fox news, they are potential terrorists. Understanding other people is not a reproducible or scaleable process and does not secure jobs in the defense industry. Building remote-controlled weapons and exterminating bad guys along with a bit of collateral, then hiding the information about it is much more reproducible.
And not just that, it is also sustainable. As long as one keeps killing people in the Near East with a somewhat loose focus, the war against Eurasia, excuse me, against Terror will be kept alive and kicking. Jobs in the defense industry depend on it. Engineering jobs.
What you propose would cause people to study languages and cultures. Do you want to make them ashamed of some curd-chewing bozos who had a high culture going long before Columbus even started killing Americans in order to make room for the outcasts from Europe?
Where is the fun in that? Where is the profit?
When everything goes South in my life, it might all because some geek has a woody for my girlfriend or wife? Ducky.
No...not a misprint.
what about the "insider information" obtained by NSA which enriches a few secret operatives?
When will that come out ?!
Groomer, Vet, dog food, doggie bath/pool, etc.
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4117625&cid=44668899 APK's "banned"? He pwned you there. Oh, it's "here", not "hear", illiterate worthless sack you project about yourself (via ad hominem illogical attacks that failed here and on security vulnerabilities Linux vs. MS OS in the link above).
... by the level of discourse in these discussions. Still, there's always room for improvement and it's just possible that words like "fuck," "idiot" and so on may get a little old eventually, so I've selected a few lines from which you folks might like to choose future invective:
On thee, the troubler of the poor world's peace!
The worm of conscience still be-gnaw thy soul!
Thy friends suspect for traitors while thou liv'st,
And take deep traitors for thy dearest friends!
No sleep close up that deadly eye of thine,
Unless it be while some tormenting dream
Affrights thee with a hell of ugly devils!
Thou elvish-mark'd, abortive, rooting hog,
Thou that wast seal'd in thy nativity
The slave of nature and the son of hell,
Thou slander of thy heavy mother's womb,
Thou loathed issue of thy father's loins,
Thou rag of honour, thou detested-
Thank you for your interest in me, NSA. However, I got a woman already.
Thanks, but no thanks.
#LOVINT...
I love New York.... == I love to listen to the mayor of New York
I love Obama == I love to listen to the wire taps of the white house.
I love Woody Allen == I love to listen to old men fantasize about _______
I love to intimidate members of Senate intelligence committee members. == Listen for dirt J. Edgar style.
I love HRC == Hillery is hot so I listen to her, Bill and Monica.
I love Paris... == I listen to anyone I want in Paris or anyplace near Paris... (all of France)
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
and read the free book, "The Hidden Evil":
http://www.thehiddenevil.com/
the author lives under a bridge and is harassed.
I hope nobody out there believes that workers in the various telecommunications corporations ain't never, ever...never ever never eavesdropped on other people's e-communications...for at least as long as there have been long-haul lines.
lolll...QA and QC, donchaknow.
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
It was carrying all the personnel and equipment that didn't fit in the first helicopter with the president.
So...the dog?
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
Hey man. Dogs are people too.
Slightly different situation, but same shit.
I used to be on an incident response team with a DoD agency doing forensics for a variety of defense organizations, and my boss's favorite thing in the world is when we would get laptops from SOCOM, because invariably the special ops guys had nude photos of their girlfriends/wives/etc on their work computers. He always had some excuse for running an image search... and so did everyone else. That kind of behavior is endemic.
but a management one. Anyone behaving inappropriately ought to face disciplinary measures. The fact that it happens to be sensitive data and that NSA officials can access it for inappropriate purposes demonstrates poor data access control and poorer HR management. It has little or nothing to do with "ooo, the spooks have all my data"
US used to be my dream country when I was a kid. If it wasn't for the numerous interesting places I'd like to take my kid one day, I'd never ever fly to this country.