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.'"

Comments

You Should Have Those Tools

[Bob9113]

"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.

The sock puppets have new talking points

[AHuxley]

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 :)