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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.'"
Because it's only simulated drowning.
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.
"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)
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"
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.