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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."
Yeah, let's just go back to intercepting peoples' messages quietly, shall we?
What's worse is your wilful misconstrual of an important privacy rights issue either out of malice or ignorance.
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.
"...either out of malice or ignorance."
Or maybe 'johnsie' is being paid to stir up the pot a little?
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!
What's worse, intercepting peoples messages or making them public for anyone to read?
Since the latter is a violation of my constitutional rights and the former is not, I'm going to say intercepting peoples messages. Any more inane questions or can we move onto the topic of why our federal government has torn up the constitution and is currently using it to wipe their ass?
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.
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?
Do you know anything? More specifically, do you know anything about the constitution, or freedom? If your idiotic mass surveillance scheme isn't being conducted with constitutional warrants and can't help but sap up a information on innocent people (millions in this case), then it's unconstitutional and evil. What is so hard to understand about that?
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Which one is the former and which the latter? Because intercepting messages sounds like it is mighty unconstitutional.
You're right, I got them mixed up. :-p
You get my point though.
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.
What's worse, committing a crime or exposing a crime?
Are you really having to stop and think about it?
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
What's worse, intercepting peoples messages or making them public for anyone to read?
If by "making them public" you are referring to the messages the article wrote of, then you are a moron. Its clear the reporter got permission from the author of the message to reprint, and the article did very well to show how intrusive the collection process is.
If by "making them public" you are referring to the NSA storing the intercepted message, and then allowing random defense contractor jerkoffs / lawyers / cops / self appointed authorities to access them in the future, then you might have a point.
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.
Plus the trolls are plentiful enough they don't need to PAY them to find a dissenting opinion!
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
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.
That's probably the funniest noir moment about this. The Washington Post, a newspaper, is being trusted with data so sensitive they don't even want to reveal some of it publicly.
A newspaper! I think I'd rather give my credit card information to Target than trust a newspaper company with knowing anything about the internet.
I would count the days until lax security leads to the raw data leaking onto the general internet, but it's probably already been read by Unit 61337.
It would be nice if the American government was competent.
That way, they could perform miracles of a semi-religious nature and we'd never know about it.
The problem I have is that we know about it.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
"Every man should know that his conversations, his correspondence, and his personal life are private."
~ Lyndon B. Johnson
someone taking a picture of your dirty underwear
The obvious question would be whether it has skidmarks in 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.
It depends entirely on how you expose the crime - posting the blackmail material into the public eye while exposing the blackmailer hasn't done the victim any good, nor would publishing a sexual predators photographs or videos help the victim.
You misunderstand the function of law enforcement.
It is not, directly, to help the victim. In many cases the victim is, after all, beyond help.
Rather, it is to prevent future victims. First by putting the victimizer out of business - and if that doesnt help the existing victim, in fact even if hurts the victim, it still has to be done, for the sake of the potential future victims. This is why we ask rape victims to testify even though they may find that as traumatic as the original crime. Not to fix the damage that's been done (that's the function of civil law, not criminal law) but to prevent future damage.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
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:
I guess reality hasn't strayed far from ridiculous Ren & Stimpy fiction.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_dyOxAfEzI
From 8:25 on (though the rest is pretty hilarious).
"Molest me not with this pocket calculator stuff."
- Deep Thought