Slashdot Mirror
New Snowden Leak: of 160000 Intercepted Messages, Only 10% From Official Targets
An anonymous reader writes in with the latest news about NSA spying from documents leaked by Edward Snowden. Ordinary Internet users, American and non-American alike, far outnumber legally targeted foreigners in the communications intercepted by the National Security Agency from U.S. digital networks, according to a four-month investigation by The Washington Post. Nine of 10 account holders found in a large cache of intercepted conversations, which former NSA contractor Edward Snowden provided in full to The Post, were not the intended surveillance targets but were caught in a net the agency had cast for somebody else. Many of them were Americans. Nearly half of the surveillance files, a strikingly high proportion, contained names, e-mail addresses or other details that the NSA marked as belonging to U.S. citizens or residents. NSA analysts masked, or "minimized," more than 65,000 such references to protect Americans' privacy, but The Post found nearly 900 additional e-mail addresses, unmasked in the files, that could be strongly linked to U.S. citizens or U.S. residents."
The amount of spin applied to the article is incredible. It reads like a propaganda piece designed to have snippets quoted out of context. Good soundbites.
In NSA-intercepted data, those not targeted far outnumber the foreigners who are
Which appears to imply that we only target foreigners... Since Americans are "untargeted" they don't deserve a mention.
At one level, the NSA shows scrupulous care in protecting the privacy of U.S. nationals and, by policy, those of its four closest intelligence allies — Britain, Australia, Canada and New Zealand.
And then they never balance out that "At one level" until three paragraphs later.
Then, they spend most of the article on a fucking fluff piece about the content of some romantic messages. What the fuck is this shit?
PR spin piece, through and through. They managed to ruin an actual news story.
1. You write emails in a foreign language
2. You chat with known foreigners.
3. You use an offshore proxy (perhaps to watch sprts events not available on US TV).
4. Your broswer has stored tracking cookies from Yahoo, which advertisers consider unreliable.
These are the reported cases. Prbably there are more. Remember that the NSA claimed that it did not track people if the balance of probabilities showed them to be US citizens, but this shows that, once again, the NSA was lying.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!