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NSA Metadata Collection Program Has Stopped Zero Attacks
Antipater writes "According to a member of the White House panel that recently called for the NSA's metadata-collection program to be curtailed, that program has not stopped any terrorist actions at all. This runs counter to the stories we've heard for months, which claimed as many as fifty prevented attacks. 'Stone declined to comment on the accuracy of public statements by U.S. intelligence officials about the telephone collection program, but said that when they referred to successes they seemed to be mixing the results of domestic metadata collection with the intelligence derived from the separate, and less controversial, NSA program, known as 702, to intercept communications overseas.'"
You mean the lying liars who lie for a living... lied?
Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org
I think I might have a heart attack and die, from not suprise.
It never has and never will, it was never the intention to begin with.
...yet.
3A 4E 22 05 C1 83 0B 7A
It's random, but my posting it here is probably considered illegal to someone.
The NSA probed our anus and found shit. What else is new.
so this means that the metadata collection has stopped plenty of attacks
Thanks, brahs, for watching our backs!
No politician that already has any real power is going to want to reign in the NSA. Politicians don't want to take anything like this back. If you're the one who does, and then an attack does happen, then regardless of whether or not it would have been prevented you're pretty much handing the next election to your opponent, who will claim that the attack was your fault because you were too soft.
If you were a sociopath and cared only about your career rather than doing what's right (as a politician generally is by the time they get elected to an office where they have any real power), would you make a decision at work that had a finite chance of completely ruining your career?
Here's the real answer:
The NSA performs industrial espionage to give America and its' Allies economic advantages.
As far back as 911, terrorists knew enough not to use electronic communications.
So then what was the domestic spying used for? Political control? Insider Financial trading? Thought Police?
Apparently I'm the only one to think they were taking credit for stopping zero-day malware attacks.
Let's take them at their word and say that they did manage to stop 50 attacks. So that works out to about 4 attacks per year for the past 12 years. I will even give them the benefit that every attack would have killed as many people as the 9/11 attack. So that would give us somewhere around 13,000 people per year that would have been killed by these attacks. So without their violation of our rights terrorism would rank behind drug abuse and we don't seem to care that much about drug abuse. Even if all 50 attacks happened this year and each one killed ~3000 people the body count would only be 150,000 and terrorism would come in at #2 between being a fat ass and being a smoker.
Now in reality the number of attacks is probably much lower than the 50 they claim, and I would be willing to bet that at most a few dozen people would be killed in the most devastating of these attacks. So as others have pointed out before why are we wasting so much money and violating everyone's rights for something that is little more than a statistical anomaly.
Time to offend someone
Regardless of how many terrorist attacks it stopped, the main issue is that the government is infringing upon fundamental liberties, so even if it were effective, it shouldn't be allowed.
Pointing out the ineffectiveness of the program is all well and good, but I feel that we should not make this the main issue; freedom is what's most important.
Yeah, "less controversial" - unless you are, you know, part of the 95% of the world population that is outside of the US.
Sheesh.
This is how the terror attacks were stopped:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6nW7XvTYn0
The collection of metadata wasn't supposed to stop attacks. It was supposed to help identify possible terrorists That would allow applying for further surveillance to stop any attack and help identify other terrorists who helped with an attack, especially a suicide attack.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
The NSA, by design, does not act on the intelligence that it gathers. Other agencies, such as the FBI for domestic and CIA or DIA for foreign matters, are supposed to act on this information. Thus any "prevented" terrorist acts would be attributed to the agencies that acted, not the NSA.
I didn't know people still flew Zero's.
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
Clearly they need to expand the the scope of their data harvesting programs. An example of why is that they didn't stop the Boston bombers (even after Russia warned the FBI about Tamerlan Tsarnaev in 2011).
BlameBillCosby.com
Another way of phrasing this is that the NSA's metadata collection program, while admittedly not perfect, has met or exceeded the benchmarks set by peer agencies, such as the TSA.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
That sounds scary as shit. Sounds like something Magneto would do. I don't know about you guys, but I'm sure glad the NSA is on my side. Keep up the good work, boys!
While we're on the subject, has the TSA stopped any attacks? Seems to me they let the passengers do much of the work.
Barry also said people could keep their plans.....
Anyone who believes anything coming out of the White House is more of a moron than Barry.
Interviewer: Now tell me, what exactly are you doing?
Spotter: Er well, I'm camel spotting. I'm spotting to see if there are any camels that I can spot, and put them down in my camel spotting book.
Interviewer: Good. And how many camels have you spotted so far?
Spotter: Oh, well so far Peter, up to the present moment, I've spotted nearly, ooh, nearly one.
Interviewer: Nearly one?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RexQLrcqwc
If you can read this, then I forgot to check "Post Anonymously".
our freedoms! they hate our freedom!
These programs caught no one. Until full analyses of the cases have been released, by no stretch of the imagination can you say that anyone was "caught." The best that the government "ABC/XYZ" organizations can do is entrap old, stupid people and paranoid schizophrenics whom they give the "bomb material" to. Don't give credit where it is not deserved, shill.
which claimed as many as fifty prevented attacks
Are you sure they didn't say "up to fifty prevented attacks"? Zero counts!
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
They are claiming that AT&T and Verizon's market share are dwarfed by 'bubba the goat's fancy magic wireless phone service'? I don''t think so.
The cherry-picked insiders couldn't get around admitting the spying has no benefit. Wonder what an actual review would yield...
Program A was never designed to do B
Program A was designed to do C, which could help in B
So by saying that A didn't help B is incorrect. C didn't do B. A helped C as designed.
This sort of retarded logic is all too common when technical people try and justify their failure.
The program as a whole hasn't worked. The metadata collection is part of the program, and it may be doing great - but it's value is basically 0, because the program's value is 0.
Of course we've spent billions of dollars on it with no real return. So there's that. It's kept a bunch of storage companies alive.
We already know about NSA agents spying on former girlfriends. How many other attacks on common decency were perpetrated?
Wait 'til you hear the one about RSA taking $10million from the NSA to promote vulnerable security.
This is much much worse than many of us will admit. Despite all the other problems we face, this is the one that has to be tackled first. If we can't bring the out-of-control surveillance state to heel, nothing else can ever get really better.
And don't buy for a second the Obama Administration's press release about their "reforms" of NSA data collection. They're just trying to head off the serious challenges that are about to start coming down from the courts and from congress.
For a minute, I think we're going to have to put partisan politics aside to tackle this common threat: government surveillance.
You are welcome on my lawn.
When I read the headline, my brain filled in "-Day" because of everybody constantly pounding on the term "Zero Day" around here.
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
The NSA will announce that they've helped to capture those responsible for the recent Target debacle in an attempt to bolster their image.
Proverbs 21:19
The NSA metadata collection (and related programs, like weakening crypto) is the attack. The damage done to the country is something that will become even more evident in the next months/years.
I don't care if they have stopped a thousand terrorist attacks. I don't care if they've stopped the creation of a hundred super villains. I don't care if they've saved my own life, the lives of family, and the lives of friends. What the NSA is doing is wrong on every level and needs to stop. No amount of reform can make this okay.
The 215 program, the domestic surveillance one, is mainly aimed at the grassroots guys, locals who become inspired by people overseas but were never trained. Some of these guys did communicate with people overseas in various organizations; Major Hasan for example was communicating with AQAP but was entirely grassroots.
You also hear of stories about grassroots guys who reach out for help, but are subjected to a sting op, caught and sentenced, but were nowhere near any level of attack; they had intent and motive but no ability and were seeking ability.
So what constitutes a prevented attack? Did this program allow them to identify any targets for surveillance and round them up long before they were able to even reach the planning stage? Or is it an imminent threat with operatives in place, a plan put together, and the plan initiated? Or is it somewhere in the long line between those two?
I'm not defending the program per se, but I think it's too easy to dismiss something without defining what a "prevented" attack is, when to me stopping a couple of guys who have intent to cause harm and are reaching out for assistance to do so is a good thing to do, but doesn't exactly constitute a "prevented attack".
Preventing "Terrorists" attacks on the "U.S.A." or "POTUSA" is not the purpose of the NSA Metadata Collection Program!
Follow the money!
Who receives the "Money" from the NSA Metadata Collection Program! :-)
why would they stop intelligence agencies creating staged terror events.
Gather even more data, I guess...
Privacy is terrorism.
to, use, commas,
Any terrorists worth worrying about won't have trusted phone communications, no doubt on the rare occasions they actually use it for nefarious purposes they talk in code.
In such a way, that it's become harder for unauthorized programs to flash the BIOS at all? In that case, how many attacks they prevented is truly speculative. And the speculation, that they must have patched the BIOS themselves, secretly, would be unfounded.
It's an inherent weakness in RSA, to generate random prime numbers. In theory, if the attacker knew what method was being used, instead of trying to prime-factorize the modulus by brute force, he or she could just use the same random-prime generating scheme in their attack, that the defender used, and speed up the attack.
Hence, true RSA encryption uses only a small subset of the existing, huge prime numbers.
But then what I'd expect, is that this vulnerability does not extend to users or admins, who were not using the same random-number generating method. In this article: (Suggested Above), the security software was named "BSafe". How would it affect Linux-based Web admins, who never used the compromised generator(s), and who never used BSafe?