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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.'"
"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