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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!
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.
We are talking about 0.003% which seems "somewhat reasonnable"
That's not even close to reasonable. It's an egregious violation of the constitution and people's fundamental liberties.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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.
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.
DUI checkpoints are absolutely allowed and arguably saves a significant number of lives each year.
Fucking bullshit. In the 'land of the free,' freedom is preferred over safety. Randomly stopping people to check if they're breaking the law is definitely a constitutional violation, and it goes over the line.
Oh, some judges may have approved it, but that doesn't make it right or constitutional.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Here's the relevant paragraph from the article:
If Snowden’s sample is representative, the population under scrutiny in the PRISM and Upstream programs is far larger than the government has suggested. In a June 26 “transparency report,” the Office of the Director of National Intelligence disclosed that 89,138 people were targets of last year’s collection under FISA Section 702. At the 9-to-1 ratio of incidental collection in Snowden’s sample, the office’s figure would correspond to nearly 900,000 accounts, targeted or not, under surveillance.
They use this information from Snowden, the 160,000 intercepted messages, showing that nearly 10 people were targetted "incidentally" for every 1 legitimate target. With that 10 to 1 ratio, and a transparency report released in june showing that there were almost 90,000 legitimate targets, the math comes out to approximately 1 million Americans "incidentally" targetted.
Of course it's a crock to say these people's communications were spied upon "incidentally". They were explicitly targetted for incidental reasons such as being in the same IRC channel, using a foreign IP address, etc.
What I don't get, though, is that the list of "minimized" targets whose identities were scrubbed as being likely Americans includes "a sitting President". Does this mean they spied on President Obama's communications, and then scrubbed his identity from it? Were these legitimate targets sending threatening emails to thanksobama@whitehouse.gov or what? Did they scrub any reference to his name, even when it didn't involve communications originating from him?
How did he wind up as any of these "incidental" targets?
"Every man should know that his conversations, his correspondence, and his personal life are private."
~ Lyndon B. Johnson