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NSA Drowns In Useless Data, Impeding Work, Former Employee Claims
An anonymous reader writes in with this story of confusion at the NSA due to the flood of data they harvest. "Some of the documents released by Mr. Snowden detail concerns inside the NSA about drowning in information. An internal briefing document in 2012 about foreign cellphone-location tracking by the agency said the efforts were 'outpacing our ability to ingest, process and store' data. In March 2013, some NSA analysts asked for permission to collect less data through a program called Muscular because the 'relatively small intelligence value it contains does not justify the sheer volume of collection,' another document shows. In response to questions about Mr. Binney's claims, an NSA spokeswoman says the agency is 'not collecting everything, but we do need the tools to collect intelligence on foreign adversaries who wish to do harm to the nation and its allies.'"
Simply build a new $1.5 billion data center to process the collected data.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
the sorrows of NSA, drowned in an information cocktail, Binny o Binny why did you leave me
the woman spoke
Because it's only simulated drowning.
And if that don't work: collect more useless data.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
I think this is the problem at most companies. Once someone in charge has a "good" idea, then no one else can point out how stupid it is. Collecting data is easy, cheap. Analyzing it is what is expensive. And useful. Collecting unanalyzed data is a waste of time and effort. Period.
And the first analysis is: what sort of data should we collect to make analysis easier? But of course, if people actually analyzed the process itself, someone would have already pointed out that the only way to measure cost-effectiveness is to have an actual goal in mind. Collecting everything you can get your hands is an easy goal to state.
Stating why all that data will help you prevent attacks on America instead of being viewed as an attack on Americans is a whole lot harder to articulate.
Same old same old.
It's a lot easier to invade a country than it is to state what peace would really have to look like.
We have all this yummy data we gorged on, and we can't digest it all.
Obviously, we need a bigger budget for more contractor analysts and hiring Google to write better analytical tools.
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
Reminds me of this.
An easier solution .... treat foreigners as you would have them treat yourself or your compatriots. Apply the same standards of "justice" that you would meet out on your own citizens. That means no torture, no dronings, and respect for international law. In the end a much more successful strategy, and certainly a far cheaper one. Foreigners are not inherently evil, nor are they all plotting your demise. They are people who deserve equality.
The argument is that they have to "see everything" to see as many potential threats as they can. At a surface glance this makes sense.
At anything beyond a surface glance, you can see how mission creep happens and oversight is effectively nullified in the process.
Not all surveillance is necessary, without question the vast majority of it serves no functional purpose beyond its own self-certification.
The lying certainly isn't helping anyone trust them.
The NSA knew about some of the 9-11 hijackers, but it was lost in the noise (and in lack of interdepartmental information sharing). The solution, suck in more noise? Makes little sense to me.
Silence is a state of mime.
The belief that as the size of a pile of shit increases, the probability of finding a pony approaches 1.
After the fact it was discovered that they had lots of clues. The problem is how to link them together when you've got so much in your files.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Good. Let's create some more useless data for them, I'm starting a second Tor node and a Freenet node tonight.
"it doesn't matter if the NSA collects every form of information about every US citizen, because they are too incompetent to process this data, and worse, the more they collect, the bigger the problem becomes."
This is called the HOARDER psy-op (psychological operations- you do know that the US government spends TENS OF BILLIONS of dollars on psychological operations alone very year?) ploy. Essentially, you ask the sheeple to use their total lack of any technical knowledge to imagine processing that much data, and concluding it would be impossible. So, the average sheeple then imagines the NSA to be like those 'hoarders' constantly depicted on reality TV shows in the USA.
In reality, the NSA uses unthinkably large data storage facilities built using the SAME hardware and software engineering used by Google for its 'civilian 'corporate' businesses. Google designed software collects, stores, indexes, mines and searches the growing mass of full surveillance data collected by the NSA, with ever growing efficiency. Google designed data centres are perfectly scalable, and use commodity hard-drives to drive data storage costs to an absolute minimum. The NSA operation is the DIAMETRIC opposite to the old "space program" screwdrivers that NASA would pay bent contractors tens of thousands per tool for.
The NSA stores the CONTENTS of every available electronic message- including all phone-calls, and NOT just so-called meta-data. Google seems obsessed with voice-recognition and language translation methods because the NSA needs such reliable software to mine voice messages, and handle voice and text in non-English languages.
Voice-to-text is an imperfect 'science' and speaker recognition even more difficult. Periodically, new Google software methods are applied to all the voice data stored on NSA systems to better 'transcribe' the messages, to attempt to identify the speaker, and to translate to English where required.
NSA full surveillance programs are incredibly more widespread and comprehensive than anything hinted at by Snowden. The NSA has long moved passed the point of collecting ALL available data, and now is spending multiple billions attempting to produce new sources of data for the NSA to collect and process. 100% of these new data targets are YOU, the ordinary citizen (en masse).
Microsoft's Xbox One is the single greatest new NSA spying project to date. Every Xbox One has a unique cryptological key, and a copy of each key is held by the NSA. Every online Xbox One reports this fact to a master NSA server in the MS cloud. Any online Xbox One can be remotely instructed to begin streaming a high quality video/audio feed to an NSA server, without disrupting ANY possible activity currently underway on the console, including AAA gaming, or full use of Kinect by the user at the time.
The Xbox One, being a vastly less powerful console than the competing Sony PS4, uses far less power than the PS4 EXCEPT when in 'standby'. Why? Because the Xbox One is ALWAYS giving full power to the NSA Kinect 2 sensor bar, and is always filming and listening to to room (and adjacent rooms), even in the dark. One 1/8 to 1/6 of ALL Xbox One hardware and storage is dedicated to exclusive NSA Kinect 2 use. No game, much to the outrage of developers like the one responsible for the COD franchise, can access this hardware processing power. The Xbox One even has THREE operating systems, with the 'master' OS being the one dedicated to the NSA spy functions of Kinect 2.
The NSA is collected, by default, from EVERY Xbox Console (that is ever online and ever has the Kinect 2 spy sensor bar connected) daily full face photos and times of presence of every person who enters and leaves the same room as the console. The latest software provided to the NSA by Google processes billions of individual facial photos, attempting to identify those that belong to the same person, and ultimately use other data sources to positively identify the people.
The NSA wants a full record of who and when for everyone in ever
Foreign adversaries.
Like the Germans, French, Spanish, British, Israel and other Americans?
"we do need the tools to collect intelligence on foreign adversaries who wish to do harm to the nation and its allies."
Ahh, good, something we can agree on. You should have those tools. And you do have them, even without the dragnets. Here's how they work:
1. Pick the person who you believe wishes to do harm to the nation and its allies.
2. Start collecting surveillance.
3. Present to an appropriately skeptical judge the reasons that you believe that person wishes to do harm to the nation and its allies.
4. The judge will decide whether your evidence amounts to reasonable suspicion.
5. As long as the judge agrees, you can continue the surveillance.
It's a pretty cool system, really. It ensures that you get the surveillance on people who really do appear to be up to something, while protecting the vast majority of people who are innocent.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
Yeah, this 'employee' is claiming that they actually asked to collect less but were forced against their will to collect more than they can handle? Flat out bullshit.
They know the cats out of the bag so now they're just going to run with "We've got more information than we can use, so you really have nothing to worry about us hoarding all your data and in fact the more we collect the safer you are!"
Where have we seen this before? Oh that's right, "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!"
(captcha: seducing)
The fun the US and UK govs had was setting global standards and then passing them as 'tested' back to a tame private sector to offer in its product mix. http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/sep/16/nsa-gchq-undermine-internet-security
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/05/nsa-gchq-encryption-codes-security
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/11/04/how-we-know-the-nsa-had-access-to-internal-google-and-yahoo-cloud-data/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbulence_(NSA)
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
You mean playing 'God of the Internet' is hard to do? Imagine that.
I've said it since the Snowden leaks first came out, there isn't a way to process all of the data that is generated on the internet. And I feel that this whole bullshit concept about the NSA collecting all of the information on the internet is another way to dowse for illegal activity (dowsing as explained here) Meaning that as long as people believe 'it has the power to do such' (because it was fucking expensive to build that Utah data center), that's all that's required to get others to follow along with rulings based on secret evidence that's all redacted.
I stand by my belief that the NSA, no, humanity itself, is not capable of playing God to itself, in any way - other than self-regulation (that means a person regulating him or herself and not as a country regulating itself). This fear-mongering way of regulation is outgrown by our own understanding of ourselves.
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
We are back to the pre Snowden classic - too much information. :)
This has never been a problem due to fast sorting, keywords, voice prints, numbers called and cheap storage.
GCHQ and the NSA could get every call from Intelsat back the late 1960's for sorting and indexing. Once you have the total 'in' and 'out' points of any nation as its telco networks is constructed: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/08/dea-and-nsa-team-intelligence-laundering shows how easy a lifetime of collection can be and looks like under one small program
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Did they actually think we're all terrorist? Hell no they're just a bunch of nosy fuckers more interested in gossip than their actual jobs. If they cannot do their job without breaking the law they should be terminated. Our rights are being violated every single damn day, what's up with that?
Really is my ranting and bitching on the internet really worth so much? How is NetFlix, video games, pointless emails, text, skype chat, bitching on news sites, and most importantly some German fart fetish porn really that much of a threat that it requires being saved by the government??
That's all very nice, but be clear -
Bruce Schneier: Crypto works.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Terrorist can use any words they want, common phrases but given a different and agreed upon meaning within their dialog constraints.
On the other hand and within the timeline there was need to have an ear to the public in order to know how to respond in the cover up of 9/11 (Building 7 was not hit by a plane, It obviously was taken down by demolition and what it contained needed to be removed to help the cover up.) This is verfied!
What the government knew for certain is that they could create a feedback loop with the help of the media, so to influence the public to their bias.
They did not have to look for the needles in a hay farm (terrorist), as they were looking at the hay....... the public.
They never needed technology that didn't yet exist to process so much information for terrorist finding. They just made use of what technology they could get
Spying on Americans....
I didn't agree to have my taxes spent this way!
Every US citizen could be calling the press, contacting a political leader, becoming a local activist, working with a trade unionist, helping an author, talking to a federal agency, helping a state agency, sending HD recordings to internal affairs, funding a political foundation, questioning more wars, ...
Any of the above could be politically sensitive to current or former political leaders, their backers and top staff.
If only you can be found before your story is published, open court work or protest starts
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Thin Thread
http://www.businessinsider.com/nsa-whistleblower-william-binney-was-right-2013-6
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThinThread
http://www.whistleblower.org/program-areas/homeland-security-a-human-rights/surveillance/nsa-whistleblowers-bill-binney-a-j-kirk-wiebe
Binney.
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/backissues/2013/06/takes-the-nsas-surveillance-programs.html
http://www.democracynow.org/2012/4/20/exclusive_national_security_agency_whistleblower_william
http://publicintelligence.net/binney-nsa-declaration/
Reinstate him as DNI.
LOL The world now understands tame US crypto as used, sold and tested is junk. Encryption works when it is not weakened during development. So a lot of very skilled people can now thanks to Snowden can review and fix where needed.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Previously an article on slashdot of them wanting more data collection ...... in total contradiction to this article. http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4590265&cid=45767805
This mass collection is not about what they can process or correlate with terrorism or whatever. This massive amount is dangerous because they can target individuals. You simply can not assume that all this power will be used for the good of the nation, the inner workings of this huge system are manned by humans. They are prone to corruption, bribery, self interest and so on.
This much power with this little accountability is just bound to be used for personal gain. Imagine if some worker of this system decides he really does not like his neighbor guts. He could target that individual and discover that for example he is having an affair and the disclose that information to cause harm to that individual in particular. Well change that neighbor to some politician that is contrary to the current governing party.
The funny thing is that Metal Gear Solid 2 foretold all this more than a decade ago.
'Yes We Can!' I can hear coming in a few weeks.
A few weeks are needed to go through the legal hoops in a formal complaint within the Federal District Court System of the USA.
0.15 second delays per transmissions caused by NSA "Vacuum Cleaner" programs and TCP/IP augmented (secret, and cracked) protocols is hard evidence in the Federal Complaint.
OH BOY! Popcorn is a pop'n. :-D
Again LOL. :)
Trade deals, banking, political parties, political leaders around the world, NGO's, anti war protesters, law reform groups, environmentalists... commercial and scientific developments...end users are all at risk.
As the video you posted stats bulk collection of data is now cheap and easy. At the 43 min and 46 min point in - "we have made surveillance too cheap"
So long term, where the NSA and GCHQ got in thanks to junk encryption standards, so can ex staff, former staff and any group that can hire them.
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2013/nov/28/war-on-democracy-corporations-spy-profit-activism
Bad encryption is useless at any level or price - too many people have the keys now
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
...how can I help?
No, seriously - I tried to start discussion in a previous "The NSA is sniffing your dirty boxers" thread about the possibility of an easy-to-use browser / email plugin / app / etc. that would encourage Joe User to increase the amount of "noise traffic" he generated. E.g., something that would tack a bunch of Terror Words onto the end of every email, but more practical and less scary to use. Encourage people to automatically participate in conscientious objection to surveillance the way that they reflexively download mp3's or jaywalk.
I think the only response was "emacs spook mode", which is funny, but not really the discussion I was hoping for.
The NSA hates Tor. So running a Tor Relay is a great and safe way for us to actually do something about the NSA.
They are playing the injured naughty puppy. Please, what better way to alleviate your privacy invasion fears than to make you think they can't even handle all of the data. Surely, it's digitized, compressed and permanently stored for future data mining purposes should you ever become a person of interest. I mean really. The future FBI won't even have to profile people the traditional way, many of us are already doing it for them (hello FB).
Nothing that can't be solved with a trillion dollars or two.
I've given this capability a long and hard thought. This interception only works during an economic war and does nothing during a real war. Once a real war kicks off on any global scale, these types of interception capabilities get turned off because countries will sever certain cables and links.
Companies that are hosted in the cloud will get disconnected destroying them in hours.
I thought ThinThread(tm) was supposed to fix that. It was supposed to be able to pull the needle from the haystack. I think it works, but the NSA has made the haystack so big...
It happened to the StaSi, it happens to the NSA, maybe there's soemthing fundamental going on.
If you have unlimited funds to spend on collecting data, you won't be able to afford doing anything meaningful with it.
Is not for terrorism, or even drug fighting. Its a tool for the Democrats or Republicans, whoever is in power, to snoop on their political opponents and line their pockets by stealing civilian secrets. Look at the IRS scandal, look at Fast & Furious / Gunwalker. Nothing is beyond this out of control, corrupt as heck govt. Probably more corrupt than Russia or wherever in the world, they just were able to hide most of it (until Snowden).
,
But never, ever dare ask why so many wish to do harm to the Imperial Us and our henchman, upon pain of treasonous death.
Crypto (likely) still works now. The NSA wants to snapshot everything they can so that as their code cracking capabilities expand they can go back and decrypt old data as desired.
Yup imagine that a bug like debian's openssl bug is discovered.
That mean that the NSA can suddenly go back through all these archives and decrypt what they can.
Note: this is different from brute forcing. And brute forcing is NOT going to happen. Modern cryptography has reached the point where brute forcing is not merely difficult (like back in the time of Enigma) but beyond what could theoretically be possible with current mathematics and current physics while still even having a margin in case of some bugs.
Back at enigma time brute-forcing a password was the equivalent of searching for a needle in a haysack: proverbially difficult, but not technically impossible, given enough people and given enough time. (Or in enigma's case: given a big amount of very fast password-solving computers called bomb. Have giant halls full of them and enigma cracking became possible).
Nowadays the search space for burte forcing is immense. That would be like trying to find a grain of sand. Not anywhere on the whole planet, but even worse. That would be like trying to find a grain of sand, when each grain of sand on that Earth is actually a whole planet cointaining each one the same huge amoung of sand than our Earth. The scale is just mind blowing. Cracking this? Well not possible before the heat death of the universe. Brute-forcing modern crypto-graphy is just not possible under current laws of physics.
Breaking modern crypto usually relies on finding errors:
Like human errors:
- When the most frequent password is "123456" there's simply no point even trying to crack encryption. Just use that password and you've automatically gained access of 60% content, according to the last data leak mentionned here around.
- Add in a few more other common possibilities, take account of a few tricks, etc. and you can find even more access. Not by trying every single possible combination, but just heading for the most common ones. That's what dictionnary attacks are for.
Like implementation errors:
The mentionned openssl bug in debian. To use again the "grain of sand" metaphor, it is as if debian had a prefered spot on a nearby beach to pick its grains of sand from, due to a broken random generator.
Lastly, by looking for actual error in the algorithm themselves.
That's what happened to older algo like DES: it was found that they are not as secure as though. There are fundamental flaws in the algorithm making it easier to break. (To take another simplified image: think about ceasar-cyphers, where you rotate the alphabet around. In theory, there should be 25 different possible rotations. But simply looking at the frequencies in the encrypted text, you can spot the most frequent one, which could help you pin-point which rotation should produce the most common letter of the language. For english that means that instead of trying every single of the 25 rotations, you just try 2-3 best candidates which match clear text "e" with the most frequent coded symbol).
Regarding to modern cryptography that seems difficult. The currently considered "best" algorithme for encryption, signing, hashing, etc. (like AES, RSA, DSA, SHA, etc.) have been around for quite some time and have not been fundamentally broken. Only broken through implementation bugs.
Things like bitcoins and other alt-coins are even more interesting given that there's money at stake. Still, despite potential monetary gain, all the virtual coin heist have been through bugs or social engineering. Nobody has found a fundamental flaw in ecDSA (used in the protocol) or SHA256 (bitcoin's proof-of-work) or Scrypt (used in Litecoin), etc.
Currently, when newer algo are introduced (like SHA-3), it's not to replace broken algo (SHA256 is still unbroken) but to introduce newer interesting features (SHA-3' Keccak has an interest
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
The NSA data center(s) have a 7 day to month collection of all electronics communications in the world.
Wireless, satellite, internet, broadband, phones, wired, you name it. If it has a wavelength we have it.
The issue is not whether the US collects international data as foreigner are not protected under US statutes.
The point is if that collection on US citizens is legal and justifiable in a supposedly open democracy where citizens interest is supposed to be looked after by our elected representatives. Where was the public debate and legal findings that are accessible to the citizenry. We are rapidly veering toward a non free and dysfunctional state. Our political parties no longer represent the interests of the majority and have increasing failed us for decades. Civil unrest and grass roots organising and action are the only option that can restore the power to the people at this late date.
I commented some time back that if they were collecting anywhere near as much as was speculated, the storage required would be 'way beyond collosal. Even just collecting so-called meta data...have you any idea how many phone calls, e-mails, tweets, etc., etc. occur each and every day? And then, if you wanted to sift through all of that humongous mountain of data to find something particular, how long would it take, even if you had a supercomputer to help you?
...to make the NSA's job even harder.
Don't assume that everyone who works for a company wants what the CEO wants. Some of them think he's stupid for wanting some things, and consider other things much more important.
So those articles aren't in contradiction, you're just hearing from different voices.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
from the masses to generate more data? validity is not a requirement.
This is why i never cared if the NSA was spying on me. Cause odds are that my personal data they collect will never be seen by human eyes at the NSA cause they have so much of it, so its the same as them not spying on me.