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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.
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
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.
"Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely." -- Lord Acton
Yeah, but we need the electricity.
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
none I know..
Dallas Real Estate
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.
Wow. "Every Breath You Take" was NEVER more true (and creepy) than now.
Shiver
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Teenage boys are horny. Film at 11:00.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
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?
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.
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
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?
Snowdown worked on-site, not off-site and he wasn't working for the interests of his employer of record. Basically your entire point is hyperbole and that shit only hurts the cause. Quit it.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
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.
He worked at a contractors site on an island
No, he worked at a government facility. So do us all a favor and shut up until you figure out how to fact check yourself. You and your screaming ignorance only make this fight harder for the people who do know what they are talking about.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.