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Snowden Strikes Again: NSA Mapping Social Connections of US Citizens
McGruber writes "The New York Times is reporting on yet another NSA revelation: for the last three years, the National Security Agency has been exploiting its huge collections of data to create sophisticated graphs of some Americans' social connections that can identify their associates, their locations at certain times, their traveling companions and other personal information. 'The agency can augment the communications data with material from public, commercial and other sources, including bank codes, insurance information, Facebook profiles, passenger manifests, voter registration rolls and GPS location information, as well as property records and unspecified tax data, according to the documents. They do not indicate any restrictions on the use of such "enrichment" data, and several former senior Obama administration officials said the agency drew on it for both Americans and foreigners.' In a memorandum, NSA analysts were 'told that they could trace the contacts of Americans as long as they cited a foreign intelligence justification.' 'That could include anything from ties to terrorism, weapons proliferation or international drug smuggling to spying on conversations of foreign politicians, business figures or activists. Analysts were warned to follow existing "minimization rules," which prohibit the NSA from sharing with other agencies names and other details of Americans whose communications are collected, unless they are necessary to understand foreign intelligence reports or there is evidence of a crime. The agency is required to obtain a warrant from the intelligence court to target a "U.S. person" — a citizen or legal resident — for actual eavesdropping.'"
I'm an American and I live in a pretty undeveloped Southern African nation. I wonder how much of a profile the NSA is capable of building on me?
Upon arriving in the USA very recently my wife was flagged going through the mettle detector at IAD (she was carrying our 3 month old daughter so the TSA told her they had to do some extra checks since she had a baby in a sling, dafuq?). She spent the next 45 minutes getting checked, rechecked, patted down (enhanced pat down; under the waistband, hand up the legs until it meets "resistance", hands swiping breasts, etc.), having her carry-on bags checked and rechecked for bomb residue, all in the name of "You were carrying a baby in a sling".
I'm trying to be as honest and non-paranoid as possible in all of this. But these leaks from Snowden really do give rise to questions about how large my NSA profile has grown, simply because I live overseas.
Well, seeing that the U.S. media is totally in the bag for Obama, it's not too much of a surprise.
Seymour Hersh himself - a man who would know and who spent his entire life rooting out government crimes - just said in The Guardian: "There are some people - the New York Times still has investigative journalists but they do much more of carrying water for the president than I ever thought they would ... it's like you don't dare be an outsider any more."
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/09/time-speak-against-nsas-mass-spying
October 26th, 2013