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The NSA Is Collecting Lots of Spam
wiredog writes "One side effect of the NSA's surveillance program is that a great deal of spam is getting swept up along with the actual communications data. Overwhelming amounts, perhaps. From The Washington Post: '[W]hen one Iranian e-mail address of interest got taken over by spammers ... the Iranian account began sending out bogus messages to its entire address book. ... the spam that wasn't deleted by those recipients kept getting scooped up every time the NSA's gaze passed over them. And as some people had marked the Iranian account as a safe account, additional spam messages continued to stream in, and the NSA likely picked those up, too....Every day from Sept. 11, 2011 to Sept. 24, 2011, the NSA collected somewhere between 2 GB and 117 GB of data concerning this Iranian address."
LOL This was something that should be expected!
Linux is for people who don't mind RTFM.
So if I want to do terrorist stuff - I should probably hide my communications inside emails about ch3ap V!agr@. Eventually the NSA will have to get a mail washer to help filter out the crap and my criminal activity will go un-noticed.
---- "Logoff! That cookie shit makes me nervous!" - A. Soprano
and you never know if the SPAM are actually a broadcast messages with certain keywords carrying the instructions for their coordinated attacks. May be the typos contains letters to form hidden words too?
"somewhere between 2 GB and 117 GB" ... can't narrow it down any more than that? Are you sure it was an Iranian email address, or was it just somewhere between Israel and Yemen?
...as soon as they hear back from that Nigerian Prince.
If we colonize Mars, it won't be the World Wide Web anymore. UWW?
They're the ones with the biggest penises and/or breasts.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
Spam is actually doing something useful. Enemy of my enemy and all that.
If you're gonna go snooping through people's stuff, you're bound to find a lot of garbage.
Laughter is the Spackle of the Soul.
When most of the population (both US and World) collectively say, "That is an ridiculous and unreasonable abuse of power!!!!" I am fairly sure it is covered by the fourth amendment.
This is the reasonably discredited concept that the world has some vote on what the US Constitution should say. What the Fourth Amendment says is not subject to the opinion of Germany or Kenya or Mexico or China or ... nor should it be.
Even though some errant Supreme Court justices keep yapping about applying world concepts to US constitutional law, that's not how it is supposed to work. If the founders had wanted us to follow Greek laws, they would have put Greek laws in the US books, not assumed that 21st century justices would look to Greece as an example of how to run a country.
Simply put, if they want to search a citizen's property (digital or physical), then they need to get a warrant for that specific search.
Unfortunately, the Fourth Amendment did not put it so simply. The founders could have worded it that simply. The fact that they included the term "unreasonable" in the prohibition means they meant for there to be a concept of "reasonable" that wasn't prohibited. Nor did they use the simple words "A warrant is required for all searches."
These were simple people, doing a large task. They could have used simple words if they said what they meant. Since they did not, the clear implication is that the concepts are more complex than you make them out to be, and that they understood that.
So after sorting out all that spam, the NSA is now busy creating files on people such as miss Wumi Abdul, the only Daughter of late Mr and Mrs George Abdul, whose father was a very wealthy cocoa merchant in Abidjan, the economic capital of Ivory Coast before he was poisoned to death by his business associates on one of their outing to discus on a business deal.
So Miss Wumi Abdul, if that's your real name, wherever you are, the NSA's on to you now.
Not really. If a warrant is required for any otherwise unreasonable search, then by definition some searches must be unreasonable. What you describe is a situation in which all searches are reasonable, effectively nullifying that right.
And if you limit it only to evidence that does not prove guilt, then either all evidence is useless in a court of law or serves only to provide reasonable cause to obtain a warrant to collect other evidence. The problem is that they could then potentially use it to obtain a warranted copy of the same evidence, which would be just plain absurd, as it would effectively nullify the warrant requirement once again. And, of course, if it is useless, then there's no logical reason to obtain it in the first place, which makes the collection inherently unreasonable.
Either way, that's just not a plausible interpretation of the fourth amendment.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Your "opinion" is rather meaningless when there are facts to back that assumption. The wording in the Constitution and Bill of Rights is not vague. There is no need to re-write the Constitution or the Bill of Rights, not a single part of it.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
That statement is very clear. You are to be secure against search or seizure of your person, property, papers, and effects unless the Government has a warrant. The warrant requires a court order with someone giving testimony on why the warrant is required, and the warrant must be specific as to what can be searches or siezed.
Stop believing bullshit and learn to read! If you are not believing and repeating bullshit, you are surely making up stories to back your belief. Either way, you are wrong.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
I'm guessing everyone working at the NSA has an enormous penis. Even the women. And they're probably erect ALL THE TIME. They probably fund their entire operation with the resource given to them by those guys trying to get all their shit out of Nigeria. No doubt none of their credit cards are blocked at Bank of Aemerica, and they probably supplement their income with lottery winnings from the UK (Nigel seems like such a nice young lad) and working from home for a thousand dollars a day.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
This is what I have been saying all along for the last 10 years. Fighting privacy by making yourself more private is not the solution. The current premise of all surveillance programs that are being operated today assumes that it is generated by a human being. The easiest way to counter this assumption we can go back to the Aesop's Fable "The boy who cried wolf".
What did the boy do? The boy cried wolf so many times that in the end when he told the truth, no one believed him. If that boy was alive today and wanted personal privacy, he would be crying wolf all the time. How would that work?
Automate the process and make it easy that everyone else can do it, too. If everyone cried wolf, who would you believe? We change the assumption and accept the fact that surveillance isn't going away. However, by burying the would-be listener with unlimited content and for someone/something to groom through all that data to figure out what is relevant, what is the truth and un-truth, it is a daunting task and it opens a new set of problems. How can you assess the threat if everyone was saying the same thing all the time, became friends with everyone else? Do you really know that person? Or is everyone really friends with Timothy McVeigh because he is such a cool guy until he pull that crazy stunt in OKC in 1995. What if sleeper cells weren't so sleepy but were outright public being a sleeper cell?