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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."
What's worse, intercepting peoples messages or making them public for anyone to read?
For all Snowden's sacrifices he is barely making a dent in the collective ignorance of Americans. At least other countries are being shown/reminded of just how dangerous the NSA is to them.
As recently as May, shortly after he retired as NSA director, Gen. Keith Alexander denied that Snowden could have passed FISA content to journalists.
âoeHe didnâ(TM)t get this data,â Alexander told a New Yorker reporter. âoeThey didnâ(TM)t touch â"â
âoeThe operational data?â the reporter asked.
âoeThey didnâ(TM)t touch the FISA data,â Alexander replied. He added, âoeThat database, he didnâ(TM)t have access to.â
Robert S. Litt, the general counsel for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said in a prepared statement that Alexander and other officials were speaking only about âoerawâ intelligence, the term for intercepted content that has not yet been evaluated, stamped with classification markings or minimized to mask U.S. identities.
Every step of the way, the NSA has been forced to go back and qualify its previous statements.
And not just statements to the American people, but to Congress as well.
One analyst rests her claim that a target is foreign on the fact that his e-mails are written in a foreign language, a quality shared by tens of millions of Americans. Others are allowed to presume that anyone on the chat âoebuddy listâ of a known foreign national is also foreign.
In many other cases, analysts seek and obtain approval to treat an account as âoeforeignâ if someone connects to it from a computer address that seems to be overseas. âoeThe best foreignness explanations have the selector being accessed via a foreign IP address,â an NSA supervisor instructs an allied analyst in Australia.
And these are the carefully vetted selectors that are being used to not-spy on Americans.
It might be faster for the NSA to just make a list of the things they haven't publicly lied about.
What a farce.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
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.
The guy now faces a gradual slide into obscurity as the initial outrage over his revelations congeals into apathy and and acceptance by the vast majority... in the best case scenario for him personally, he will spend the rest of his life in departure lounge purgatory like this guy. There are plenty of worse possibilities. I wouldn't be surprised if he goes a bit loopy and we begin to get stories of him doing strange things like other well known whistleblowers who ended up in similar circumstances, when that happens we should remember that every human has a breaking point and it doesn't devalue their accomplishments. Was it worth it? Will he be vindicated in future history? Only time will tell, but what's fairly certain is he won't be alive to see it. I'm not implying there will be assassinations or whatever but that the world's slide into a darker period of history is still accelerating and it will be decades, at least, before the pendulum naturally begins to swing the other way.
And how many of those targets should be targets to begin with? With how easy it is for the government to label someone a 'terrorist' or an 'extremist', their targets are probably mostly harmless people, anyway.
This is one reason I doubt whether Snowden was an agent or just a techie looking after the plumbings. We all know that target are those we are interest in seeing the content of the messages they are sending and receiving. However, communication patterns of sending and receiving from whom, when and where are also information about these targets which may lead to other interesting targets, even if the contents were not legally allowed to be viewed by NSA. If any target is in communication with 10 others non-targets, you get a lot of messages received and sent from non-targets. Techies would know about the source and sink count of these transmissions, and know the target id's so that they can be separated and sent to real agents, but have no idea about how these information are used and results of these analysis.
The tone of this post is insane. It makes it sound like Americans are the only people on this planet with a right to privacy. What about the rest of the world? So the NSA's only crime is that it spied on US citizens? Is it perfectly ok to undermine those same rights for other human beings?
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!
How many people are really being unlawfully spied upon? I am not saying that even 1 would be acceptable. But do we have any numbers on that? Because it seems that there was 10,000 unlawful account being spied upon. This is a very small "collateral damage" on the size of the population. There are 313,000,000 people in the US. We are talking about 0.003% which seems "somewhat reasonnable"
Maybe the article was talking about only a single program. But how vast this "mass surveillance" really is?
If someone intercepts your communications, records them to persistent storage, and keeps them indefinitely for later inspection, YOU ARE BEING TARGETED. Your papers and effects are being seized without any judicial oversight, contrary to the 4th amendment of the US constitution. What the hell is wrong with you?
If you seize someone's private papers and/or effects, commit them to persistent storage, and keep them around forever just in case you need them... you ARE TARGETING THEM. Anyone with their communications in NSA possession has been a target of NSA surveillance. If they weren't targets, the NSA wouldn't have kept the data.
So the Navaho Speakers of WW2 would probably qualify in your list. Even today they speak to eah other in Navaho and also write emails using their native language.
Yep Traitors/Terrorists/Bad Guys the lot of them
There are probably more than a few inside the 'Beltway' that would agree with that last statement though I do not.
Posting this may well get me on their 'they are a person of interest list', along with probably 30% of US Citizens.
Paranoia at its best.
You have the right from search and seizure.
That means that unless YOU (YOU!) are specifically under reasonable suspicion (and often probable cause), for having done something, you CANNOT be touched.
Any and all bulk metadata collection and bulk full take, regardless of who is eventually pulled out of the pile,
IS AGAINST YOU AND YOUR RIGHTS TO NOT BE COLLECTED. DO YOU FUCKING UNDERSTAND?!?!?!
Unless YOU're in some shit and have reasonable/probable specifically upon YOU (FIRST!!!!) Your metadata is YOUR BUSINESS.
They CANNOT just go grab all the metadata, then go link it all up fishing.
Metadata is YOU.... YOU FUCKING STUPID PEOPLE.
And they have ZERO right to get it without an exact fucking warrant that NAMES YOU SPECIFICALLY.
There is NO discussion to be had on these 'news' releases... it's just plain WRONG.
So WAKE UP SHEEPLE!!!!
Start calling your congresscritters and running third, fourth and N party campaigns... NOW!!!
Or accept the rape of you, your children and grandchildren... FOREVER!!!!!
Hey Post, List the names of the people intercepted. Maybe that will light a fire underneath a few of them.
They're capturing "metadata" on every conversation/email/message. Now to me metadata includes the contents of the message (conveniently translated to text format, ergo "meta-")..
In any case they're spying on all 300M Americans.They're guaranteed to read the ones referenced in the article.
The government is clearly breaking American citizens (and those on its soil) constitutional protections. The NSA does the spying and hands off "tips" to American law enforcement. American law enforcement are then required to do what is called "parallel construction" whereby they lie to the court on how the investigation came about.
If you think your not in this dragnet think again. And not only are you in the dragnet if the NSA thinks law enforcement will benefit from the data they'll pass it on. For those of you who remember 9/11 and the laws which were passed the one really dangerous protection that was eliminated was separation of FBI/police/NSA. The government consolidated these agencies into the department of homeland security with the specific intent to make it easier to share data between them. This was in the name of fighting terrorism. The reason we had these laws that prevented the sharing of data in the first place though was because of civil rights abuses in the past. Think Martin Luther King.
The only true patriots on 9/11 were thrilled. Not because innocent people died, but because somebody was fighting back against an illegal acting and oppressive government. While its a different form of oppression it is oppression. The reason for 9/11 was the US governments oppression in the middle east (and even this may have been facilitated by our own government, but keep in mind that is pure speculation). Now these terrorist may be oppressors too, for which we should object, but anything to quell the US government and rein it in is a good thing. Unfortunately the reality is it only works when a large and powerful enough opposing force does acts. And in this case the government used it as an excuse to seize even more control.
Note that this is not yet Greenwald's "Fireworks show" - his promised grand finale was delayed from 4th July. From what I've gleaned, there will be a big-bang scoop naming specific names of US citizens - major public and political figures - who were wiretapped by the NSA. USG has claimed there will be some harm done, so the story has been delayed while the journalist team investigate.
Stay tuned. I can't wait.
The article doesn't really specify how the 90% were spied upon. It could simply be as a consequence of recording a telephone from a known suspect. I imagine that even a terrorists normal activity consists of many mundane things that involve innocent people: they order pizza, they go to bars, they buy things in stores, etc. Of course if someone is under surveillance, all these innocent people also get involved by the simple fact that they become somehow possible accessories in his crime. I would imagine that 90% of the activity of any criminal, including organised crime, is fairly innocuous, and innocent people will be also recorded because of this.
What I would really like to know is how much of this gathering of information is a consequence of the gathering of information on a possible suspect or simply a mass gathering of data about everyone with the filter applied afterwards. If the suspect is already under surveillance, I imagine that the innocent population would tolerate a loss of privacy simply because that person is a threat. If it is the other way around, that is that information is gathered indiscriminately in order to search for possible suspects, then it is extremely dangerous.
The fact that the Post does not describe in detail these findings makes the article more sensational than useful in my opinion.
How is it he is still alive to continue to trash Americans' security?
"Every man should know that his conversations, his correspondence, and his personal life are private."
~ Lyndon B. Johnson
If they believe TOR exit nodes are legitimate targets (which is a very difficult question), then all of the sudden, the volume of collection starts to look very reasonable.
The problem will be when most of the countries will drop american services such as cloud, facebook, google, etc.. Russia already sign the low, that all data must be preserve in russia, otherwise they will cut access on isp level. Same in china, brazil. There will be many struggle it companies without ability to expand outside of usa market or they will build center in such countries to avoid being cut.
Plus they memorized all the secret alien docs. Source: X-Files.
Goes loopy? The guy already is nuts and a megalomaniac - who else would sell our secrets to the Soviets/Red Chinese for publicity? And if Putin isn't the same as Stalin then just wait awhile...
what about your precious google? or every other site on the internet?
Navajo isn't foreign to America.
The Capitol Beltway is a highway that literally circles Washington DC. You don't need to dramatically quote beltway like that, but "inside the Beltway" looks better.
Building camps all over w/ razorwire pointing inward (keeps people in) + 3 body caskets in those camps? I'm not. I.E.-> You don't "play ball w/ the in-team" (military industrial complex) in you're going to go, AFTER they "get the goods on you" via PRISM.
Building camps all over w/ razorwire pointing inward (keeps people in) + 3 body caskets in those camps? I'm not. I.E.-> You don't "play ball w/ the in-team" (military industrial complex) in you're going to go, AFTER they "get the goods on you" via PRISM!
Building camps all over w/ razorwire pointing inward (keeps people in) + 3 body caskets in those camps? I'm not. I.E.-> You don't "play ball w/ the in-team" (military industrial complex) in you're going to go, AFTER they "get the goods on you" via PRISM!!
Building camps all over w/ razorwire pointing inward (keeps people in) + 3 body caskets in them too? I'm not. I.E.-> You don't "play ball w/ the in-team" (military industrial complex) in you're going to go, AFTER they "get the goods on you" via PRISM.
Building camps all over w/ razorwire pointing inward (keeps you in) + 3 body caskets in them too? I'm not. I.E.-> You don't "play ball w/ the in-team" (military industrial complex) in you're going to go, AFTER they "get the goods on you" via PRISM!
Building camps all over w/ razorwire pointing inward (keeps you in) + 3 body caskets in them too? I'm not. I.E.-> You don't "play ball w/ the in-team" (military industrial complex) in you're going to go, AFTER they "get the goods on you" via PRISM...
Building camps all over w/ razorwire pointing inward (keeps you in) + 3 body caskets in them too? I'm not. I.E.-> You don't "play ball w/ the in-team" (military industrial complex) in you're going to go, AFTER they "get the goods on you" via PRISM!!
Building camps all over w/ razorwire pointing inward (keeps you in) + 3 body caskets in them too? I'm not. I.E.-> You don't "play ball w/ the in-team" (military industrial complex) in you're going to go, AFTER they "get the goods on you" via PRISM!!!
Building camps all over w/ razorwire pointing inward (keeps you in) + 3 body caskets in them too? I'm not. I.E.-> You don't "play ball w/ the in-team" (military industrial complex) in you're going to go, AFTER they "get the goods on you" via PRISM!!!!
Building camps all over w/ razorwire pointing inward (keeps you in) + 3 body caskets in em? I'm not. I.E.-> You don't "play ball w/ the in-team" (military industrial complex) in you're going to go, AFTER they "get the goods on you" via PRISM!
Building camps all over w/ razorwire pointing inward (keeps you in) + 3 body caskets in em? I'm not: You don't "play ball w/ the in-team" (military industrial complex) in you're going to go AFTER they "get the goods on you" via PRISM!
Building camps all over w/ razorwire pointing inward (keeps you in) + 3 body capable caskets in em? I'm not: You don't "play ball w/ the in-team" (military industrial complex) in you're going to go AFTER they "get the goods on you" via PRISM!
Building camps all over w/ razorwire pointing in @ top of their fences (keeps you in) + 3 body capable caskets in em? I'm not: You don't "play ball w/ the in-team" (military industrial complex) in you're going to go AFTER they "get the goods on you" via PRISM!
Building camps all over w/ razorwire pointing in @ top of the fences (keeps you in) + 3 body capable caskets in em? I'm not: You don't "play ball w/ the in-team" (military industrial complex) in you're going to go AFTER they "get the goods on you" via PRISM!
Building camps all over w/ razorwire pointing in @ top of the fences (keeps you in) + 3 body capable caskets in em? I'm not: You don't "play ball w/ the in-team" (military industrial complex) in you're going to go AFTER they "get the goods on you" via PRISM!!
Building camps all over w/ razorwire pointing in @ top of the fences (keeps you in) + 3 body capable caskets in em? I'm not: You don't "play ball w/ the in-team" (military industrial complex) in you're going to go AFTER they "get the goods on you" via PRISM!!!!
Building camps all over, razorwire pointing in @ top of the fences (keeps you in) + 3 body capable caskets in em? I'm not: You don't "play ball w/ the in-team" (military industrial complex) in you're going to go AFTER they "get the goods on you" via PRISM!
Building camps all over, razorwire pointing in @ their fencetops (keeps you in) + 3 body capable caskets in em? I'm not: You don't "play ball w/ the in-team" (military industrial complex) in you're going to go AFTER they "get the goods on you" via PRISM!
Building camps all over, razorwire pointing in @ their fencetops (keeps you in) + 3 body capable caskets in em? I'm not: You don't "play ball w/ the in-team" (military industrial complex) in you're going to go AFTER they "get the goods on you" via PRISM!!
Building camps all over, razorwire pointing in @ their fencetops (keeps you in) + 3 body capable caskets in em? I'm not: You don't "play ball w/ the in-team" (military industrial complex) into them you're going AFTER they "get the goods on you" via PRISM!
Building camps all over, razorwire pointing in @ their fencetops (keeps you in) + 3 body capable caskets in em? I'm not: You don't "play ball w/ the in-team" (military industrial complex) into em you're going AFTER they "get the goods on you" via PRISM!
Building camps all over, razorwire pointing in @ the fencetops (keeps you in) + 3 body capable caskets in em? I'm not: You don't "play ball w/ the in-team" (military industrial complex) into em you're going AFTER they "get the goods on you" via PRISM!
Building camps all over, razorwire pointing in @ the fencetops (keeps you in) + 3 body capable caskets in em? I'm not: You don't "play ball w/ the in-team" (military industrial complex) into em you're going AFTER they "get the goods on you" via PRISM!!!
Building camps all over + razorwire pointing in @ the fencetops (keeps you in) & 3 body capable caskets in em? I'm not: You don't "play ball w/ the in-team" (military industrial complex) into em you're going AFTER they "get the goods on you" via PRISM!
Building camps all over + razorwire pointing in @ the fencetops (keeps you in) & 3 body capable caskets in em? I'm not: You don't "play ball w/ the in-team" (military industrial complex) into em you're going AFTER they "get the goods on you" via PRISM!!
NSA's not allowed to surveil internal to U.S. citizenry. Only foreigners. FBI can surveil us inside the US though. Get it?
So the President was not the intended surveillance target but his correspondence was unintentionally caught up in their surveillance net as they target terrorists. And they save the President's correspondence. If I was the President I would be very upset.
Building camps all over, razorwire pointing in @ their fencetops (keeps you in) + 3 body capable caskets in em? I'm not: You don't "play ball w/ the in-team" (military industrial complex) into em you're going AFTER they "get the goods on you" via PRISM...
What are you, apk's gay secret admirer? Doesn't matter who posted it. It got me thinking on what it said.
It's GAY secret admirer (since the troll posted by ac like all apk's trolls lately do since he's kicked their asses under their registered luser accounts so many times and tosses it back in their faces when they use those registered luser slashdot accounts).
The American NSA Stasi is out of control. I wonder if it is now too late to be able to restore some form of democracy to the United States. The lines between corporations, the military, and the ruling junta are now so blurred that it may no longer be possible to effect a bloodless separation.
One is whether it's wrong to spy on anyone
That's a no-brainer. Simply imagine that instead of the government spying on you, it's your next-door neighbor -- intercepting your email, tracking your location, recording your every online and cellular movement into a permanent database.
Would you (or any conscious human being) approve of that? Of course not.
So now, the question becomes this: what makes government any different than this hypothetical stalker? After all, government is comprised of mere human beings, each of whom operates in his own self-interest, just like your next-door stalker.
I think the most effective campaign to raise true awareness of the dangers of the organs of state security would be highway billboards that merely say: