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NSA Planned To Discredit Radicals Based On Web-Browsing Habits
wired_parrot writes "New leaked documents show that the NSA was not only monitoring suspected radical sympathizers, but planned to discredit them based on their web-surfing habits. This includes not only evidence of porn browsing and online sexual activity, but also extortion and blackmail based on inappropriate use of funds. At the same time, the leaked document notes that very few of the targeted contacts were associated with terrorism."
first "if you're not doing anything wrong, you've nothing to hide" post!
Why would one lose ones credibility because of that?
If anything I wouldn't trust someone who doesn't watch porn..
Those that don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Unfortunately we get to come along for the ride.
Look where all this talking got us, baby.
I think the NSA's plan here is the reason that we'll always have some privacy protections.
If everybody has a little bit of privacy (that the NSA can still break) there are always tactics like revealing 'embarassing' information available.
In a situation where privacy protections are incredibly strong (i.e.: the NSA is defunded and disbanded for a privacy violation), or nonexistent (i.e. yeah I browse granny-with-midget porn, so does half of the state, and here's the URL to a list of all of us) these kind of embarassing reveals don't work so well.
So, here's to our limited privacy protections! Just another weapon in the arsenal of sociopaths who are running the show.
Information imbalance creates a vast power imbalance. And we'd be fools to think that this power imbalance would not be exploited. Generally, in military terms you talk about capabilities, rather than intentions when making assessments. So when universal surveillance becomes a capability, we have to assume it's not just used, but used universally. And one doesn't have to go far in history to search for consequences of having such a system. While not nearly as sophisticated, East Germany during the Soviet era provides plenty of evidence for what WILL be done with the information obtained as a result of a vast surveillance network. In a few words, mainly ammunition for the government to persecute and discredit critics (which isn't new), but also alarmingly but unsurprisingly, a way for those with access to this information (specific individuals within law enforcement and government) to exert this power over other private individuals for spite, profit, blackmail, coverup, etc. It's happened before. We have to be fools to think it won't happen again.
Given the shroud of secrecy the NSA has created, it would be impossible to tell what evidence was real and what was fabricated. So if the NSA wanted to frame one of these "radicals" -- or a sitting member of Congress -- who would be able to refute those charges?
When are Congressmen going to publicly admit that this rogue agency is a greater danger to national security, in any meaningful sense of the term, than Al Quaeda ever was?
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
Is there any bottom to this at all? Seriously, I expected them to be nasty, bureaucratic and invasive but it sounds like they were taking policy guidelines from conspiracy websites.
any "superstar" CEO more as well.
There goes that argument.
But I'd give you a bump if I could.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
The fact is, the 3-letter spy agencies have ALWAYS capitalized on blackmail. That these agencies even exist, in my opinion, is based on their blackmail powers. But these days, as politicians are actually standing up for their wayward ways (thank Rob Ford and Bill Clinton!) I think it's time we stop persecuting people for being people. (Crack smoking mayor? I have to draw a line there but the idea is good.) If someone gambles, weigh it in on how you feel about them. If someone is gay, SO WHAT?! If someone likes to dress up like a girl (and isn't one) who cares?! As long as these people aren't hurting anyone else, it's time we judge people based on the jobs they are doing. This blackmail crap has got to end.
Should we have a government agency in charge of spying on politicians? MAYBE! But in charge of spying on EVERYONE? No.
It really is, except this time there's no messy "black bag" B&E jobs to get into homes and find porno mags, read diaries and letters, etc. Just hack into their computers and it's all right there.
But I'm sure that they would NEVER go that far.
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
You know, it's funny but I don't believe I recall seeing "...until we don't agree with your speech, at which point we'll collect dirt on you and blackmail you with it" in the first amendment. Must be in the second edition.
The Great Firewall of China begins to look like a useful protection for their citizens at this point.
(Yes, I realize that the majority of these people were not on US soil, but it's purportedly a principle, and one the US criticizes any country who does not espouse, and as such should apply more broadly then just to people standing on US soil at the time).
Min
On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
While most won't mind the NSA blackmailing (potential) terrorists using their web history, why stop there? Hasn't the NSA already blackmailed high ranking EU politicians, using the very same techniques, to ensure that SWIFT data will continue to be shared with the US, despite the European Parliament's motion to suspend this data sharing? See where all this leads to?
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
Secretly monitoring innocent people, because they are political opponents, in order to persecute them for political reasons. Sounds exactly like the Stazi.
This is scary stuff, because they already have a lot of this information stored down, probably permanently, from all of us - and they have demonstrated a willingness to abuse this information for political reasons against the population; this isn't just in the US either, but all around the world.
This puts a lot of people in potential danger, not in the present, but in the future: How can anyone be confident what kind of government will be in control in their country in 10/20/30 years time? Will that government target you with violence for your political views, past/present?
Now they have a lot of the information (and all of the means) they need to do it.
What did the NSA know about Tamerlan Tsarnaev? That's what I want to know. If the mass surveillance is justified, how did they not know about his plot? How did they fail to prevent it?
If you're referring to Julian Assange, those rape charges were the fault of radical feminists getting their beliefs entrenched in European rape law, not the NSA.
Wow, that could backfire really nicely.
NSA spying on electronic sex talk of every overseas US serviceperson (and sharing lists of the 'juciest' 'phone sex' conversations they had recorded). Was this fact alone not the BIGGEST wake-up call to the actuality of NSA full surveillance abuse.
Snowden has access to programs that are the TINIEST tip of the iceberg of full surveillance projects across the globe. Snowden was a VERY low level operative with knowledge of trivial and disposable side projects. The true heart of the NSA project is insanely more ambitious.
1) Full surveillance projects exists to primarily create feedback loops between the current state of mind of the general populace, and the propaganda projects in the mainstream media that seek to change and manipulate the mindset of the people. The usual vile shills here tell you that even though your government spies on every private aspect of your life, you shouldn't care, because they have no interest in you as an individual. In a strictly technical sense, they are right, since most NSA spying is like endless real-time polling of the population (or sub groups) to find out how such groups are thinking or responding.
However, the purpose of this spying is to give your masters MUCH better control over your lives, and THAT fact will effect you most certainly as an individual. For instance, Team Obama and Team Blair wanted to launch a genocidal bombing campaign against Syria, but YOU the people were so against this war, despite the most depraved anti-Syria propaganda campaign in every mainstream media outlet, that the monstrously evil plan was 'cancelled'. Billions are being spent researching why the propaganda failed, and NSA feedback on the subject is an essential part of the analysis.
2) As this story proves, the NSA seeks to gather intelligence on the entire population, in order to create potential blackmail information against every citizen, should that person become a 'PERSON OF INTEREST' in the future. Use the N-word in your own home in front of the Xbox One as a naive youngster? You may find that fact impossible to explain years later when you are seeking political office- but ONLY if you are foolish enough to have political views that, for instance, don't serve the interests of Israel or Monsanto etc.
3) Full surveillance operations by the NSA and others allows grass-roots social/political movements to be identified BEFORE they have wider significance, allowing rising leaders to be 'eliminated' or co-opted. The NSA maintains the status quo by identifying potential opposition at an early enough stage for that 'opposition' to be dealt with with near zero greater public awareness.
Those that consider themselves as part of the elite, like the eugenicist Bill Gates, are happy to dedicate their lives to finding better ways to control YOU, the sheeple. And worse, when Gates PROVES that the sheeple are so weak-willed, servile, stupid, and pathetic, they raise ZERO complaint about his 'Common Core' project, his inBloom "every child tracked in every aspect of their life" universal database (which contains the best intelligence resources would-be child abusers could dream of), and his NSA spy device in every home Xbox One, the elite becomes even more certain of their god given right to exploit 'lesser' Humans in every way possible.
Actually, I was also referring to Dominique Strauss Kahn (seems to be a common tactic these days). Poor boy made the mistake of challenging the supremacy of the U.S. dollar as IMF chief. Within a few months he was in handcuffs, with the prosecutor announcing a "rock solid" rape case--forcing him to resign. Three days after his successor was sworn in as the new IMF chief, the prosecutor dropped all charges and announced the case had no merit.
I guess the lesson here is, don't fuck with the U.S. government.
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
Arms inspector Scott Ritter, who called Bush and company liars. Immediately monitored to hell and back, reputation ruined by mysterious surveillance forces within months of taking the fight to Bush's people. Being right was no excuse; he was never allowed on Oprah again, or anywhere else. We invaded Iran under false pretense. He's in prison after the second round of surveillance.
As for the charges, which they ultimately nailed him with? Dunno. Why does everyone assume that computers can't lie? Once you set up the premise that we are catching lots of bad men, it's child's play to make you a bad man - just invent some logs, some chat, and boom goes the dynamite. I don't trust electrons when they are under the control of people who would bomb 60,000 people to death for oil and conflating brown people with other brown people.
And talking to girls online is a crime they can hang on a lot of men, anyway. He didn't *do* anything. Except piss the right people off. On the other hand, Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Ashcroft and Rice are rich and free after stealing trillions in oil, starting two endless wars, and killing over a hundred thousand people.
Assume that people are watching you, listening to you - retroactively - if you annoy the right people. They can indeed hang you with six lines. Hell, I do now christen this "Richelieuing".
I think that these unexplicable strings of characters that always contain the word "FreeBSD" and pop up under every slashdot article are actually used by the NSA/CIA as number stations to convey secret messages to their minions.
NSA: Sheik Abdul Muhammad Hussein likes to look at boobies.
Sheik: The NSA is lying.
Follower #1: Yeah, the NSA is lying.
Follower #2: Boobies? Where's the boobies?
The FBI used similar tactics on the "most dangerous Negro" aka Martin Luther King -- they bugged his bedroom and then tried to blackmail him with an audiotape of him having sex with women who weren't his wife.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Arrest Donald Trump in the name of national security? You're not an NSA shill trying to convince us of the value of this program are you?
The "publishes articles without checking facts" puzzled me for a minute. Until I realized it goes hand in hand with deliberately feeding news commentators false data so that they would publicly destroy their own credibility.
Gee, I think we may have seen some of that recently.
Will
See also: fraud charges against S&P after downgrade of US debt rating.
I think foreigners could be forgiven for thinking that constitutional fetishism is some kind of strange cult. Like the tinfoil hatters and "sovereign citizens" could read the minds of men dead for 240 years...
"NSA was not only monitoring suspected radical sympathizers, but planned to discredit them based on their web-surfing habits."
1) Preventing this (*EXACTLY THIS*) behavior by the government, is the purpose of the 4th Amendment.
2) When government employees are sworn in, they swear to protect the people from "enemies foreign and domestic." Clearly, The NSA, the *entire* NSA, is a domestic enemy of the USA. See #1 above. So when is the Justice Department going to begin to live up to their sworn duty and bring the NSA to account for their treasonous behavior?
Funny then how many Jews were killed. And how about, not just go to work but don't go near there? And how come I didn't get the message nor did any other Jewish person I know?
"Trust is good but control is better"
We know the NSA captures a lot of information on everyone. So now, whether you like them or not, you are likely to believe anything the say about anyone. Which means the NSA can discredit, blackmail, manipulate, or destroy anyone they want. It does not matter whether the information they have is real or fabricated. There is no way to successfully refute anything they say about anyone.
What a monster we have created.
Proverbs 21:19
There is certainly less collateral damage than there is with a Hellfire missile fired from a Predator. I agree that the killing of non-combatants is their biggest recruitment tool. But this is a Western viewpoint, and not a very practical approach in the crazy world of jihad, fundamental religions, and bronze-age existences.
How to disseminate this info to the True Believers is the real problem. The targets are generally spiritual leaders who can tell their followers any old story about anything at all, and it will be accepted as Truth. "Lies and propaganda from the West are proof that they are evil" kinds of crap. These guys are the ultimate Spin Doctors, who can issue the death penalty to anyone not buying 100% of their bullshit.
Evidence, logic, facts, questioning authority, and free-thought are actively suppressed by every fundamentalist religion. And the region is generally controlled by sympathizers, so it's not like you can just pop a video of Mullah bin-Wankin's private habits onto the 6:00 news and discredit him that way.
So while they may have blackmail-quality evidence against these guys, nobody who would actually take him out back and stone him to death for his offense will believe it, if he tells them not to.
John
Um what?
If the idea is that this activity is being legitimized by fighting Terrorism, I don't quite buy it...
NSA: "Stop being a terrorist, or we will blackmail you by showing all your terrorist buddies all the lewd websites you visit!"
Terrorist: "I am going to stop being a lunatic and be rational for a second. A) Do you really think that is something that might dissuade a terrorist, or make a terrorist feel even more warm and fuzzy about the USA? B) Do you really think my terrorist buddies will believe the NSA (I mean come on we can get them to believe anything, but coming from you... lol)? C) Who exactly are you going to tell? Do you have lists of terrorist buddies? Because I think if you did, you might do something a bit more constructive with it. OK back to the crazy...
This seems like something that is far more likely to be politically motivated than anything to do with terrorism.
Sounds like something the NSA would say.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
I mean if the NSA in noseing in on people via the internet and what the people access on the internet...... I bet the NSA has the world largest porn and child porn collection and etc... in the world. So I have a question: How much discrediting might they do to the Catholic Church? Given the unsavory history of things the church has done?
You can also look at Saddam Hussein. Except he ended up losing his head because he was brown instead of French.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
"very few of the targeted contacts were associated with terrorism""
After being blackmailed and harassed by the US government their views towards state target terrorism might change.
Republicans get elected to outlaw abortion, but all they try to do is repeal Obamacare. Is this how representative democracy supposed to work?
Every single one of those women were having sex with a married man. Adulterously against MLK's wife.
And any of those women married? Don't care.
But cheating on your wife? "Scumbag!".
Ensuring that I'm not posting as AC to help drive this in...
Just because sex and nudity is considered taboo and only for deviants by all of the repressed Mericans, doesn't mean that everyone will be embarrassed by making it visible. Some of the other stuff may help discredit, but not the porn.
My sausage tree didn't grow, does that make me a bad mommy?
Keep in mind that "radical" simply means "has different political opinions than those with the most political power". This was a direct suppression of everything democracy stands for and every value this country was founded to protect. The NSA has not only committed illegal acts, they have committed high treason.
I'm the same person I was 30 years ago, in that I would answer questions about morality, and what's right vs. what's wrong pretty much the same way as my 1983 self.
It's the NSA that's become radicalized.
I don't think the the NSA has enough disk space (or interest) to collect the porn of the average American.
No, just the metadata about every session.
It's to keep you safe! really.
No good deed goes unpunished.
It's not like you even have to be the NSA to gather this information. Just getting a glance over someone's shoulder on C-Span at the right time should be sufficient. We might even find out, if anyone ever watched C-Span.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
What, next you're gonna say that Hussein was going to price his oil in Euros shortly before the US invaded? C'mon, that's crazy talk - what, was Gaddaffi going to organize a gold-backed African dinar before Libya was invaded? Oh...
Don't mess with the Federal Reserve's petrodollar or its client government will go after you.
For awhile there, they all included "gay" in there somewhere, too. What does it mean? o.o
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
The problem here is not with exposing the information, but with how said information was obtained in the first place.
In a similar vein, we can still be uneasy about unconstitutional searches leading to arrests of genuine criminals.
And these radicals were just going to believe whatever the US government accuses. In fact, what's stopping them from making it up and just accusing them anyway?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Yeah the sun is going nova and cats and dogs are living together. The whole world is falling apart because some shitty insurance plans got canceled by the insurance companies that issued them. So much doom.
I got here through a series of tubes
The same tactics that are taught to intelligence workers for targeting political thought that threatens what are euphemistically called 'US interests' can be brought to bear on anyone spreading ideas that threaten the internal power structure as well. We've already seen the lengths that the security state will go to in order to protect itself, and that it even considers get-out-the-vote activists to be dangerous. What you espouse may seem innocuous, but any kind of change threatens someone's power, and now that unlimited funds can be spent to control what government does in the name of corporate personhood, you can easily be a target as well.
I dramatized this situation back in 2007 as part of a series of short stories about a group exploring ways to improve the workings of government. Here's a link:
http://klurgsheld.wordpress.com/2007/09/28/short-story-double-agent/
The US should spend money on this kind of thing - privacy intrusion and all - instead of military adventures. Less bloody and more effective.
How about not spending money on either, and start valuing freedom?
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trial
Our logs show you visited site X, and talked to terrorist Y.
Well, you could have fudged those logs.
You can verify them with your ISP.
Well, you probably fudge those on a regular basis.
Your router logs! Your own router shows that--
You mean the routers that you routinely deploy malware against via FOXACID? Sorry.
When you get caught lying to congress, you lose your last gambling chip.
We'll just have the CIA kill you then...
Indeed, I always knew it would come to this.
what's funny is, even good intentions today can land you into an extortion scam...
Law Enforcement has always had a 'scam' side to it, just think about speed traps...
now with LE and Military using contractors, there is a financial incentive to generate new 'scam victims'
because one contractor does work for law enforcement, military, AND corporate clients, the information becomes vulnerable to anyone willing to take the risk of using it
taking that risk is much more likely due to the financial incentive I mentioned above
Thank you Dave Raggett
But hey - if I have a plan that costs $150 a month, only covers emergency room visits for immediate, life threatening injuries, does not cover pain medication or amputations, does not have any in-network providers, allows a maximum hospital visit of 24 hours (including the hours waiting in the ER waiting room), does not pay out-of-network benefits, has a $5,000.00 deductible, has a lifetime maximum benefit of $10,000.00, and audits show over 50% of valid claims are improperly denied .... I want to be able to keep my plan!
At least it is only on the internet, and not with boots on the ground. I'm sure the NSA would never do anything crazy, like stage a sexual assault case against a foreign activist that was publishing state secrets.
The document said the people who were being followed, had very few contacts with terrorism and that they were speaking to non radicals in an attempt to get them to join them.
If true, heads should roll, period. (Career or jail-wise)
I used to think of Snowden as 80% asshole and 20% hero. Perhaps that should be flipped.
Table-ized A.I.
If you ignore the 30 million people that have had premiums double in addition to the 9 million cancelled,you would have a point. And those shitty policies that failed to cover items, like the mandatory birth control and pregnancy care forced onto every policy including the 55 year old woman with a hysterectomy!
If you work for a big company, you already had some immunity. Yours is coming next year. When your rates double because you have to pay for prenatal care as a single guy with no girlfriend I'm sure you will hop on the band wagon with everyone else.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
"Just eat" is a perfectly reasonable solution when the problem is that they are just _refusing_ to eat healthy amounts of food.
Anorexia isn't when someone just refuses to eat. It's when they have a psychological issue with eating. Were it as simple as "just refuses to eat", then yes, they could just as easily "choose to eat".
If it takes a psychiatrist to convince someone to "eat", then it isn't a case of "just" anything. It's a serious issue, and Carlin was far far from being funny when he ranted on the problem. It was on the same level as making fun of cripples and gimps, and I put it that way to demonstrate the lack of "funny" he was.
And to St. Peter I must say
I learned my lesson well
You see, I worked at NSA
Now send me down to hell...
I wonder what the old-school NSA people think of this era of No Adult Supervision. Perhaps some Anonymous Cowards would give us a hint.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
Disk space is cheap with compressed files. The "average American" would only need to be the:
"average political American been active online/letters to press"
"average" protesting anti war American
"average American" who worked for a contractor, mil, gov or political party.. and seems to be reading the "wrong" political sites later in life...
average American with friends around the world or strange book buying habits...
i.e. disk space for any files on any section of the US population of interest to the US gov is not limited. The digital notes just keep on getting added and reviewed by contractors until the file is passed on for other tasks as needed.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
I almost can't hold back when I hear government people talking about individuals getting radicalized. They make it sound like some sort of ugly disease that one catches by talking to people who are radical. Exactly how does one become radicalized? The government takes it that any person who disagrees is a radical. It is as if we are supposed to recognize and respect many social and political positions. It does not dawn of them that people can study and read and that given information some citizens will be less friendly towards government. There are real problems that cause suffering and it i to be expected that some people speak up or act out due to their pain and stress. The nonsense of mass slaughter of school children by people who go over the edge is like a canary down in a coal mine. When we see these incidents we need to get pressure off of people in the areas in which the crimes took place.
How much a digital evidence trail is worth is simply a function of how much the plaintiff or prosecutor wants to exploit it. Take the actions of the MAFIAA groups and their flimsy evidence surrounding file sharing and such -- they're suing and settling right and left not because of the quality or even accuracy of the digital evidence against the defendants, but rather, because of the vigour with which they pursue the cases.
Vaya con huevos, my darling.
Instead of posting based on summaries...
The people targeted by the NSA were not innocent political activists they were hardcore radicals they were jihad and Al Queda supporters.
This wasnt necessarily effective at directly stopping them from doing terrorism but I see nothing wrong with using that information to discredit them with their followers or blackmailing them for intelligence purposes or become informants.
The constitution does not protect non-citizens outside the US who advocate violent acts against Americans and nice people(non-muslims and non radical muslims) from being embarassed or blackmailed or whatever other non-lethal dirty tricks we wish to do.
What was that plugin that would randomly wander the net
looking for odd, obscure, nice and nasty stuff to pollute
any web browsing history and obfuscate true online habits?
This seems to be the only way to confound these fools.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
Women have been forced to pay for viagra and prostate exams, why shouldn't we cover women's health care now? You're just a bitter old man looking for a reason to complain. No one really cares what you think.
I got here through a series of tubes
Women have been forced to pay for viagra and prostate exams,
It was never forced into a woman's insurance policy to pay for Viagra, so you are a liar. Compare prostate and breast exams and you would be unbiased, but you are biased.
why shouldn't we cover women's health care now?
Another lie, woman's health care was covered previously. A woman could be in the most beneficial plan for her, as my example about the 50 year old woman shows. Now her premium is doubled because she has to pay for prenatal care and birth control and she can't have kids.
You're just a bitter old man looking for a reason to complain. No one really cares what you think.
Typical idiocy, ad hominem does not trump truth and reason. Lie + Lie + Name Calling does not trump all. Of course when you are convinced that lies are truth, I don't expect much else.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.