850 Billion NSA Surveillance Records Searchable By Domestic Law Enforcement

onproton (3434437) writes The Intercept reported today on classified documents revealing that the NSA has built its own "Google-like" search engine to provide over 850 billion collected records directly to law enforcement agencies, including the FBI and the DEA. Reporter Ryan Gallagher explains, "The documents provide the first definitive evidence that the NSA has for years made massive amounts of surveillance data directly accessible to domestic law enforcement agencies." The search engine, called ICREACH, allows analysts to search an array of databases, some of which contain metadata collected on innocent American citizens, for the purposes of "foreign intelligence." However, questions have been raised over its potential for abuse in what is known as "parallel construction," a process in which agencies use surveillance resources in domestic investigations, and then later cover it up by creating a different evidence trail to use in court.

Comments

ICREACH?

[Anonymous Coward]

I always knew Apple was involved in this.

Re:ICREACH?

[Anonymous Coward]

haha, that's hilarious! I almost laughed.

this is such shit!

Re:ICREACH?

[Anonymous Coward]

As an Apple fanboy i Approve with a hearty chuckle.

Re:ICREACH?

[Culture20]

ICyREACH. I predict it will have a chilling effect on free speech, etc

Re:ICREACH?

[aralin]

No, it won't. The US govt. figured out something that the Russians still didn't. Talk is cheap, actions are rare. You can let them talk and talk and talk, you just make up some excuse to arrest or harass the few who act. There won't be so many so you can usually hide it under drug arrests or something else innocent looking. With enough laws on the books, everyone is guilty of something and since you know what everyone is doing, you can arrest pretty much anyone for a legitimate on the books crime. And if you cannot arrest them, maybe their family or friends did something illegal. You can blackmail, bargain, ... That is the power of NSA.

Re:ICREACH?

[HermMunster]

When you hit that page the large graphic makes people believe they've been directed to a potentially malicious site. They need to shrink it a bit so people that follow the link curious about what's happening don't think that they have hit the site itself.

Re:ICREACH?

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't seem to understand what a "chilling effect" is.

Simply knowing that your every word and every movement is recorded and available for inspection at any time is extremely chilling. When you constantly have to worry about how your words and actions might be misconstrued, either accidentally or deliberately, then by definition you can't speak freely anymore and you no longer have freedom of association.

Re:ICREACH?

[aralin]

I lived through it in a socialist state on the other side of the iron curtain, so don't tell me I don't understand it. I've experienced "Chilling Effect" or "auto-censorship" as we used to call it first hand.

But I am telling you that this is not going to happen here, because the government is making extra sure that it doesn't. First amendment violations are simply sacrosanct, because the first amendment is the best tool of population control. There is an extremely powerful lullaby in effect: "We still have free press and if something really bad happened, the government would first have to stomp on the free press. As long as that is there, we are safe."

What I am telling you is that a total population control can be reached without affecting the free speech in any way whatsoever, which is so much worse than any chilling effect.

Re:ICREACH?

[Anonymous Coward]

James Risen

Re:ICREACH?

[Anonymous Coward]

I lived through it in a socialist state on the other side of the iron curtain, so don't tell me I don't understand it. I've experienced "Chilling Effect" or "auto-censorship" as we used to call it first hand.

That was just the 1.0 version.
Just because it isn't as heavy-handed and in your face does not make it any less effective.
That was overkill, this is just the right amount.

Re:ICREACH?

[Anonymous Coward]

Should've called it IKREACH.

"Kreacher has been watching..."

Re:ICREACH?

[Noah Haders]

every time I come across a top secret NSA I memo I tweet it just for the lulz.

Re:ICREACH?

[davester666]

No, if Apple did it, it would be called 'iWatch'

Re: ICREACH?

[Anonymous Coward]

This, I could not upvote this enough.

Re:ICREACH?

[Anonymous Coward]

The same free press that's censoring and hiding the fake beheading of a journalist to allow the US Government to proceed with yet another illegal invasion?

Re: ICREACH?

[Anonymous Coward]

dogs dont have hands. you are clueless.

Re:ICREACH?

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

It's not hidden - it's all over the place, if you are stupid enough to watch it. Family sites are right to censor or remove it.

Re:ICREACH?

[houghi]

The problem with the free press is that it is not an independent press. The press that matters is owned by companies that are often the cause of the problem.
Furthermore the press is a marketing tool for their customers. That are the companies who buy advertisement places or times. And those

The people are the product that is being sold.

Re:ICREACH?

[Sciath]

What you are describing may have been true of the America fifty years ago when we had a truly independent and professional press concerned with informing the populous in an objective way. That's no longer true. The media is as obtuse, slanted, bias, divided and misinformed and directed than ever before. News is very competitive and all the networks are more concerned about profit and promoting their own agendas than they are dedicated to uncovering the objective facts. Not only that but the world's viewing public will watch whatever re-enforces their preconceived notions and biases demonstrating that even the public don't care about facts, just entertainment.

Re:ICREACH?

[Anonymous Coward]

Heh. I like that. "Don't tell me that I don't know what a 'chilling effect' is..." and then the guy unwittingly describes a chilling effect. For a second time.

Re:ICREACH?

[aralin]

And why do they do that? Because they feel safe. They feel the safety of the first amendment. "If there was something truly wrong, someone would violate the constitution and we would know..." But as long as we have freedom of speech and no fraud in the voting process, we are fine. That is the lullaby. The fact that both candidates are picked by the same guys and they agree on 90% of the important stuff and just argue about fluff, the fact that press is actually controlled by the same people who pick the candidates for elections, those are things that are hidden. They are hard to understand, people who point them out look like lunatics, because they are not featured in any of the mainstream press and when they are, there is some talking head trashing their reputation to pieces. These things are hard to understand, but "fair elections", "democracy", "freedom of speech", those are simple concepts, easy to explain. We are the good guys after all, right? And that's why the first amendment is actually a population control tool.

Re:ICREACH?

[david_thornley]

Okay, I'm only sixty, but I don't actually remember a "truly independent and professional press concerned with informing the populous in an objective way". I was about fifteen when I was in a position to read about something in the paper and see it from the insiders' point of view (Mom was a teacher, and the negotiations between teachers and board got nasty), and compare the two. The media was presenting selective facts that were against the teachers, not even mentioning what the teachers considered the major points of dispute (like prep time for classes).

So, I haven't believed in that sort of press for forty-five years now.

Told ya...

[houstonbofh]

So all that "slippery slope" shit from 10 years ago doesn't seem so stupid now, does it?

Re:Told ya...

[redeIm]

It never seemed stupid to anyone with even a tiny bit of knowledge about history.

Re:Told ya...

[Anonymous Coward]

You're not wrong. 850 billion records? The Stasi would have wet themselves. It took a lot less for the people of the GDR to storm buildings.

Re:Told ya...

[Jane Q. Public]

It sure was said to be stupid by a boatload of people on Slashdot when the rest of us tried to say it really was a slippery slope.

I have a feeling a lot of people will be looking back at what many of them call "crazy conspiracy theory" today when some of those things turn out to be real, too.

Of course many of them really are just crazy conspiracy theory. But not all of them. Real conspiracies can exist and have existed throughout history.

But there's another thing that some people don't account for: a lot of people, operating under the same (often but not always) erroneous assumptions or misinformation, can make it look like there is a conspiracy when it's really not conspiracy at all. Just a lot of people making the same mistakes.

Re:Told ya...

[Charliemopps]

It never seemed stupid to anyone with even a tiny bit of knowledge about history.

Oh come on. I know a guy with that same attitude at work. You're normalizing the situation with this nonsense fantasy that you knew all along. You didn't know all along... you worried about it, you feared for it, but you didn't know Now you do, and you should be surprised... shocked... outraged... But to sit back in your lazyboy, burp, and say "yea, I figured!" is freaking ridiculous. Write you God damned congressman. Get a picket sign. The house is on fire, just because you told the kids not to play with matches doesn't mean you don't need to grab a bucket now.

Re:Told ya...

[redeIm]

You didn't know all along... you worried about it, you feared for it, but you didn't know Now you do

This isn't the first time the NSA has done something like this. When the Patriot Act came around, and even before that, anyone with a brain knew that they were at least spying on citizens. If you give the government the power to collect all this information on people, that's what it's going to do. Plus, there were news stories long before Snowden that dispelled all doubts. What I did not know was the details of the programs, and that was what information Snowden provided.

Re:Told ya...

[redeIm]

The existence of the slippery slope was just too obvious. Again, we have all the government abuses throughout history to attest to that.

Re:Told ya...

[Anonymous Coward]

...It took a lot less for the people of the GDR to storm buildings.

Yeah, but the GDR people were not busy shopping.

Re:Told ya...

[aralin]

True that, I remember the stores at that time and they were pretty much empty... :)

Re:Told ya...

[ATMAvatar]

I wouldn't call it stupid, but it is a logical fallacy. Given what we knew 10 years ago, it was only logical to point out the fallacy of assuming that everything you said or did was monitored, because there was little/no public evidence of such. That it turned out to be true does not make the past arguments any less fallacious.

Re:Told ya...

[Anonymous Coward]

1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8 what's the next number? Do you know? Have you worked in the MIC? I grew-up in it, served, and went on to do DoD contracting once I got out. Nothing crazy high level classification, run of the mill secret stuff and it has been obvious from the inside for a long, long time. Which is why I got out.

Re:Told ya...

[Anonymous Coward]

But there's another thing that some people don't account for: a lot of people, operating under the same (often but not always) erroneous assumptions or misinformation, can make it look like there is a conspiracy when it's really not conspiracy at all. Just a lot of people making the same mistakes.

That is a very important fact. These things happen not because of deliberate malevolence - something that only exists in movies and fairy tales - they happen because "the road to hell is paved with good intentions." The people who create these systems are too ignorant of history and human nature, too focused on catching bad guys and take their own righteousness for granted.

There is a famous quotation from Friedrich Nietzsche that goes, "He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you." It took me many years to fully grasp the depths of that aphorism, but I see it at the heart of everything that is wrong with US government's response to 9/11.

Re:Told ya...

[Anonymous Coward]

A slippery slope is most certainly not always a logical fallacy, and it certainly isn't one when you take into account all the instances of government abuse throughout history.

because there was little/no public evidence of such.

Nonsense. Years before Snowden, we had testimonies of people who knew about spying like this. The government's response to 9/11 also made it clear. Those things combined with the fact that the NSA was obviously not above doing things like this made it far more probable than not that the populace was being spied on. Give people massive amounts of power, and they will abuse it; that is an indisputable fact of history.

Re:Told ya...

[sillybilly]

Yeah, I got two things to say:
1. The 5th amendment protects the fact that you may have dirty laundry, that in your view is not dirty, but the prevailing public view, it is. Everybody makes mistakes, without exceptions. Well, maybe Mother Theresa. That's like 1 out of 7 billion who never make mistakes.
2. The potential for false information input by those running it. Because centralized power is corrupting - for instance, we change presidents like diapers, for the same reason - they get shitty after a while. It's better to have local communities decide for themselves, than decisions coming from up top. The problem with that is social mobility in the sense of you don't really know who this newcomer is, and the central database can help you find out. It's different if you grew up and lived your whole life in the same village, where everybody knows everybody, and work the same job for 40 years, where everybody knows everybody, and any newcomers are quickly subjected to testing and figured out by the gang. But social mobility does have good sides to it too, but there is something about stable families, stable work environments, and stable villages.

Re:Told ya...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, maybe Mother Theresa.

Mother Theresa was quite a wicked human being, once you study a bit about her.

Re:Told ya...

[Anonymous Coward]

> Mother Theresa was quite a wicked human being, once you study a bit about her.

If you believe in hindu-style reincarnation, then definitely.
If you believe in the dignity of human life then not so much.

Re:Told ya...

[rtb61]

Of course no one would guess what the NSA is 'really' up to by providing this database. The NSA are creating another database, who searches what when. They are tracking every search, who did it, how it associates with other searches made by that person over time. Nothing like being able to extort the guys with guns in uniforms or which county mounties to feed to the feds, or which feds to gain control of. Using this NSA database would have to be a seriously dangerous thing, best left to an assigned clerical officer to conduct all the searches prepare a report and thus obfuscate the nature of the individual searches. The database is bait and also a means by which to attempt to legitimate criminal acts, the initial with out warrant invasion of privacy.

Just to remind people what privacy really is all about. Slaves have none, no privacy of person, all of their body was accessible to their master for what ever abuse their master was inclined too, the slave had no right to private property and the slave had no right to private thought or expression. Privacy is all about ceasing to be a slave, a right to privacy of person, privacy of possessions and privacy of thought. The more rights to privacy you lose the more you become a slave. The more they take, the more they will want to take, until you are fully enslaved. That is the real reason to fight for as much privacy as possible to keep the threat of slavery as distant as possible.

Re:Told ya...

[Anonymous Coward]

In what way? Enquiring minds want to know (but some of us have work soon, and don't have time to look it up because of other tasks).

Re:Told ya...

[Anonymous Coward]

They didn't have it ingrained into them as children that they were the one truly free people on the planet, and anybody who says otherwise is either a commie or just jealous, too.

Re:Told ya...

[bill_mcgonigle]

So all that "slippery slope" shit from 10 years ago doesn't seem so stupid now, does it?

The biggest lesson learned is that when Congress passes a law, to kill a program like Total Information Awareness, all NSA will do is change code-names and reassign the workers to a different team.

When NSA says "we have not done X in program Y", it means they have done X in program Z. When it says it has not conducted illegal activity under Authority Z, it has done it anyway, under some other contrived interpretation of a different authority.

To quote Robin Koerner on every new NSA disclosure: "Of course they did."

Now then, who thinks we still live in a functional Republic?

Re:Told ya...

[Anonymous Coward]

Too many of those people were willing to shrug off 3000 dead in a recent terrorist attack. So it was hard to take them seriously.

Re:Told ya...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Search" doesn't count if their queries take months. On the other hand, if they somehow managed to put together a system where their search queries are 1 day across that corpus, I may celebrate a legit government achievement.

Re:Told ya...

[Cyberax]

Basically, she enjoyed inflicting pain on other people by denying access to painkillers. All while living quite a cushy life herself.

Re:Told ya...

[cdrudge]

Write you God damned congressman. Get a picket sign. The house is on fire, just because you told the kids not to play with matches doesn't mean you don't need to grab a bucket now.

Grab a bucket and do what? Using your fire/bucket analogy, it's a multi-alarm raging inferno billed as a "fire fighter training exercise" to give them practice should a "real" fire happen in the future. The Congresscritters are the government officials that signed off on the approval to run the training opportunity. There's no amount of writing or picketing that's going to help.

Re:Told ya...

[Anonymous Coward]

> Basically, she enjoyed inflicting pain on other people by denying access to painkillers. All while living quite a cushy life herself.

Wow, what a fucked up interpretation.
It is just another example of making the perfect the enemy of the good.

Sure, she could have done more and better given infinite resources and infinite knowledge.
But that is not the same as enjoyment.

Re:Told ya...

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey-hey! Good for you, you saw the writing on the wall years ago on /. .... WHO GIVES A SHIT!? I saw it long before even you did it seems. Back when I was like 12 (granted I had politically active parents as a kid -- teachers taught us about pilgrims and indians happy supper, my dad handed me a real history book on the topic). IT MEANS FUCK ALL NOTHING

Fix the future and fuck off with this self-indulgent bullshit.

Re:Told ya...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm the guy who asked for more information from Cyberax. Any chance you could clarify your statement?

Re:Told ya...

[Anonymous Coward]

Brilliant. The government if fucking you in the ass and your only comment on it is "I told you so." What the hell does that get you?

This is why they get away with it: It quickly devolves into a finger pointing competition. Very few people seriously ask in the open "What do we do?"

NEWFLASH: They were spying on innocent people long before you caught on in your sophomore year of college 10 years ago. Or more likely, translated your suspicions into some bullshit notion that you knew all along.

The founders did the SAME SHIT, spying and persecuting simple farmers, and business people alike that were guilty of NOTHING but having been loyal to the crown at one time in the past.

This is way older than computers. Of course you're all pissed off now though, cause YOU might be caught up in it.

This finger pointing bullshit is a stupid game for exactly that reason: it's older than any of us. Suggesting if we'd done something about it in 2004, IF ONLY THEY HAD LISTENED TO SOME RANDOM PERSON ON THE WEB WITH DELUSIONS OF GRANDEUR THINGS WOULD BE AMAZING RIGHT NOW, is fucking insane.

Go fix your computers, nerd.

Re:Told ya...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sorry to burst light into you black hole, but the federal government started these types of spying programs (obviously not with the tech that is used today) this shit has been going on for close to 100 years, the FBI was built not just for "law enforcement" but as a means to do domestic spying on US born and raised citizens.

It is easy and common knowledge which can be looked up, there are detailed files long before the NSA came along, explaining techniques on how to collect personal detailed files on "targets" and even how to entrap, and defame those targets. An example would be leaders of the civil rights movement, why in the world would you dare question other people that have had knowledge of this if you do not? The US government went on with that communist bullshit for years, only to try and implement its own form of control over citizens, they went after any and everyone that they considered a threat or a communist, and all they did was practice their rights as "free citizens" in a non-lethal, non-violate way.

How could you not "already know" this latest "threat" would lead to this unless you live in a black hole. Not trying to insult you, but to inform you others are fully aware from our governments previous history, whats going on right now was long suspected to have been taking place, I have a suspicion that this was going on prior to "terrorism" but because of terrorism it seems to be perfectly okay to do this. And its over nothing more then control.

Terrorists can easily and quickly turn the US into chaos and the NSA, HS, FBI, CIA, and the other known/unknown agencies would be pretty much powerless to stop it. And it isn't because of the government "stopping threats before they happen". A, these fighters that join up lose their fight when they get back into normal society, and B there are not that many over the top extremists that are interested in going around and trying to destroy targets outside the middle east. The Boston bombing shouldn't have happened if this (ridiculous) spying network was actually working the way they claim it is.

Re:Told ya...

[Anonymous Coward]

I always knew but I did not think it was gonna turn out to be this much which now makes me think how I always told my uncle he was being too paranoid but it looks like the jokes on me. I'm just glad he's not around to see what I suspect is just the beginning of his nightmare.. It sucks that I have to be around for it, I don't want any part of it I just want to be left the hell alone.

Re:Told ya...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll just leave this here

Re:Told ya...

[Anonymous Coward]

> I'm the guy who asked for more information from Cyberax. Any chance you could clarify your statement?

She raised a ton of money, a not insignificant portion from scumbags like Charles Keating. But she ran over 500 centers, that spreads the money pretty thin. They also weren't places for medical treatment, they were closer to hospices.

Given finite resources, do you concentrate on a few and let many go completely ignored or try to maximize coverage even if it means less improved conditions for any single individual? Different people will weight that decision differently, but it isn't like she was living on a yacht herself. She died while getting the full-blown modern hospice treatment, but that wasn't entirely her decision by that point either and even if it were that's a far cry from what most people would consider "a cushy life."

Re:Told ya...

[Anonymous Coward]

> Basically, she enjoyed inflicting pain on other people by denying access to painkillers. All while living quite a cushy life herself.

Wow, what a fucked up interpretation. It is just another example of making the perfect the enemy of the good. Sure, she could have done more and better given infinite resources and infinite knowledge. But that is not the same as enjoyment.

Different AC here. If she'd said "If I had more resources, I could have alleviated more suffering," you'd be right.

Instead, she said "I think it is very beautiful for the poor to accept their lot, to share it with the passion of Christ. I think the world is being much helped by the suffering of the poor people.", and (to a dying cancer patient) "You are suffering like Christ on the cross. So Jesus must be kissing you." (She freely related his reply, which she seemed not to realize was meant as a putdown: "Then please tell him to stop kissing me.")

Seeing religious virtue in withholding pain relief from cancer patients is not bedside manner; it is torture. Even Jesus wept when one of his buddies died.

Re:Told ya...

[Cyberax]

Bull-fucking-shit. Painkillers are cheap, she could have easily afforded them for cancer patients. A fentanyl patch costs less than $3 and provides relief for a day. Morphine is even cheaper.

And others in this thread already gave you links to her exact words praising suffering.

Re:Told ya...

[Anonymous Coward]

> A fentanyl patch costs less than $3 and provides relief for a day.

You don't seem to grasp the scale here.
Lets say, very conservatively, that her charity ministered to 1 million dying people in the nearly 5 decades of operation before her death.
Lets also say, very conservatively, they averaged only 30 days under care before death.
That's 90 million dollars. Just for painkillers alone. No food, no clothing, no sanitation, no other medicines, no rent, no support staff, no fundraising, no advocacy, no administration, no equipment, no furniture.

I'm confident that she raised well over 90 million dollars in that time, probably 2x or 3x that. But still not the kind of money that would make 90 million dollars totally optional.

> And others in this thread already gave you links to her exact words praising suffering.

Sorry, I don't see any such links. Slashdot's UI is pretty bad for people who don't use javascript anymore.
But I'm going to assume you are referring to this quote:
"I think it is very beautiful for the poor to accept their lot, to share it with the passion of Christ. I think the world is being much helped by the suffering of the poor people."
What you see as "enjoying" I see as acknowledging the dignity of people in an impossible situation.

I don't believe in sainthood and all that other bullshit, I don't believe she was perfect and I don't have any respect for cults of personality. But the standard criticism of her seems to lack context, misleadingly playing up her imperfections in the same way the sainthood stuff misleadingly played up her positive aspects.

Re:Told ya...

[Jane Q. Public]

I highly recommend the Penn & Teller "Bullshit" episode "Holier Than Thou", which was partly about Mother Teresa.

I'm not sure if it's the whole episode but here's a link.

Re:Told ya...

[Jack Griffin]

At what point is there too much information? We all have TB of storage at home with shit we never watch or read again, yet we still keep it. I can only imagine the cost of all this data hording and question at what point is the cost of all the infrastructure to maintain it, no longer worth the effort?

Re:Told ya...

[MildlyTangy]

It never seemed stupid to anyone with even a tiny bit of knowledge about history.

Write you God damned congressman. Get a picket sign. The house is on fire, just because you told the kids not to play with matches doesn't mean you don't need to grab a bucket now.

Why do people continue to perpetuate the myth that writing to* your Congressman will actually have any effect on their decisions? First off, if your letter is read by a human, it is most certainly not your Conressman who reads it, it is a staffer. Second, their decisions are negotiated and paid for by the system of Lobbying that is prevalent throughout the US government.

Even voting wont make a real difference, there are only two Parties to choose from, and they are not much different from each other at the end of the day.

* why do people continue to omit the word 'to' when talking about writing to a member of congress? wtf?

Re:Told ya...

[Anonymous Coward]

> Different AC here. If she'd said "If I had more resources, I could have alleviated more suffering," you'd be right.

You are being disingenuous. You don't know the context of those quotes. I'm pretty confident she was not being asked to justify "enjoying inflicting pain" on the dying. However, I'd be totally willing to change my opinion if presented with the actual context of those quotes. If you have it, please share it.

Re:Told ya...

[redeIm]

The countless abuses of government power throughout history, and simple, observable human nature, should have made it plainly obvious that giving the government that much power was a awful idea. Furthermore, we're supposed to be "the land of the free and the home of the brave," and our country was founded on a distrust of government, which is another reason for all the limitations we place upon it. I cannot even fathom how anyone would not understand this.

It's not that they just shrugged it off; it's that throwing away fundamental freedoms and the constitution for security is inherently disgusting. You should take the critics seriously. The people who are trying to manipulate you after some disaster are the ones who should not be taken seriously.

Re:Told ya...

[Cyberax]

Here's an excerpt:

On principle, strong painkillers are even in hard cases not given. According to Mother Teresa's bizarre philosophy, it is "the most beautiful gift for a person that he can participate in the sufferings of Christ". Once she tried to comfort a screaming sufferer: "You are suffering, that means Jesus is kissing you!" The man got furious and screamed back: "Then tell your Jesus to stop kissing."

Re:Told ya...

[Cyberax]

You seem to cling to the illusion, don't you? Mother Theresa's charity got _billions_ in donations over its lifetime. More than enough to spend more than $50 million dollars on Mother Theresa's air travels alone. Which could have been enough to buy strong analgesics for those who really needed them (hint: not EVERYBODY in her Homes). And her organization also spent at least tens of millions on anti-abortion and anti-contraception propaganda.

Basically every study that tries to look into the matters in details comes to the same conclusion - she was a fraud and a fanatic. The most recent one: http://www.independent.co.uk/v...

Re: Told ya...

[Anonymous Coward]

given that 9/11 was done by your saudi friends and iraq was punished for it, i say you are a naive idiot. they did 9/11 for top dollar.
now find out "they" are as a homework exercise.

Re:Told ya...

[Anonymous Coward]

But the gun nuts are still completely crazy for thinking the government wants to ban all guns then become (even) more oppressive.

Re:Told ya...

[Anonymous Coward]

You are disgusting and I really mean that. How dare you once again try to marginalize people who have been trying to save us all while we spit in their faces for it. Go to hell.

Re:Told ya...

[sillybilly]

I did not know she was that perverted. Geez, some of these white women need a good gang bang by a bunch of big black dicks to make them chill out, and satisfied, temporarily, lest they go and get off on really really sick and mental shit like this. Women by nature are psychologist controller button pushing freaks, all are perverts and fucked in the head beyond belief, but Mother Theresa gotta be the one who tops the cake.

Re:Told ya...

[orgelspieler]

Except the Stasi would not have had the capability to sift through 8 billion records, much less 850B. That's what's even scarier, they can search through this stuff so fast. In all the shit I've written over the years, I'm sure there's something to indict me on. And I'm a pretty clean-cut guy.

Re:Told ya...

[sillybilly]

Ok, nobody is perfect. But the overall picture is that Mother Theresa was a very good person, who dedicated her life to helping others. And judge for yourself from some of these quotes, how she thought most of the time, even if the dark feminine wild side did take over her once in a while, overall she was cool:

Intense love does not measure, it just gives.

Love begins at home, and it is not how much we do... but how much love we put in that action.

I have found the paradox, that if you love until it hurts, there can be no more hurt, only more love.(sick)

We think sometimes that poverty is only being hungry, naked and homeless. The poverty of being unwanted, unloved and uncared for is the greatest poverty. We must start in our own homes to remedy this kind of poverty.

Peace begins with a smile.

We need to find God, and he cannot be found in noise and restlessness. God is the friend of silence. See how nature - trees, flowers, grass- grows in silence; see the stars, the moon and the sun, how they move in silence... We need silence to be able to touch souls.

Be faithful in small things because it is in them that your strength lies.

We ourselves feel that what we are doing is just a drop in the ocean. But the ocean would be less because of that missing drop.

Spread love everywhere you go. Let no one ever come to you without leaving happier.

If you can't feed a hundred people, then feed just one.

There is always the danger that we may just do the work for the sake of the work. This is where the respect and the love and the devotion come in - that we do it to God, to Christ, and that's why we try to do it as beautifully as possible.

Let us touch the dying, the poor, the lonely and the unwanted according to the graces we have received and let us not be ashamed or slow to do the humble work. (sick)

The miracle is not that we do this work, but that we are happy to do it. (sick)

Love begins by taking care of the closest ones - the ones at home.

Joy is a net of love by which you can catch souls. (semi-sick)

The greatest destroyer of peace is abortion because if a mother can kill her own child, what is left for me to kill you and you to kill me? There is nothing between.. (I disagree with this quote - as in we don't have a problem flushing sperm and eggs down the toilet, neither an undifferentiated embryo, without a brain, nor even a sleeping baby. In fact if you eat meat, and you're willing to kill a cow with a conscience greater than a 4 months fetus, how do you justify that. If anything you should be willing to kill yourself before you go out and kill other beings in the world, and only proliferate as much, or only take as much as it's proper, as circumstances allow, and stay in harmony with nature. People like to fuck, or even masturbate. It's human nature and without that drive you would not be here. It's constantly on the mind, and if it's not ever on the mind, it's not healthy either. So you have teenager fuck, and her not realizing that she's pregnant, and be able to make the life and death decision until 4 months into it, you need time to weigh the issues and think it through, but each minute you waste is creating a smarter and more conscious and aware baby away from an mindless 1 cell or 4 cell or 1000 cell embryo contraption. The thing is you can always make more babies on demand, there is no problem with the ability to supply 15 babies per mother from age 22 to 45, so if she aborts at age 17, she can maintain her social environment of going to high school, college, and have a career and decent life, as opposed to a totally fucked up life because she made a mistake at age 17 and got pregnant by accident. It's a personal choice for everyone, and some mothers who did not abort, think they absolutely made the correct decision, and had a good life anyway, but there are a lot of sad stories of potential good life going down the drain, over a "mistake" of I just wanted to fuck and get off with an awesome big orgasm, I did not real

Re:Told ya...

[Anonymous Coward]

That is not context. That is Christopher Hutchin's narrative.
That you find it convincing suggests a little too much creduility.

Re:Told ya...

[Anonymous Coward]

> Mother Theresa's charity got _billions_ in donations over its lifetime.

Citation please. The link you just included refers to millions, not billions.

> More than enough to spend more than $50 million dollars on Mother Theresa's air travels alone.

Ok, now you are being ridiculous. She did not SPEND 50 million on air travel she had RAISED 50 million.
That is the number that was in the account of her charity when she died.

How can anyone take you seriously after you wrote something that:
(a) doesn't pass the laugh test
(b) can be so easily verified with google?

> Basically every study that tries to look into the matters in details comes to the same conclusion

That is intellectually dishonest because there is only ONE study plus Hitchens's polemic.

Re:Told ya...

[Cyberax]

Yeah, really? How about Forbes: http://www.forbes.com/2010/08/...

Re:Told ya...

[Anonymous Coward]

> Yeah, really? How about Forbes

I'm sorry, which point is that intended to address?
I don't see any mention of billions of dollars in donations.
I don't see any mention of spending on air travel
I don't see any mention of studies, just a couple of anecdotes without context.

You are starting to come across as rabid and incoherent which is enough to convince me that you are emotionally invested in an extremist interpretation of the facts. I think convincing someone to expose that about themselves is the only realistic end-goal in a debate like this so I will be closing my browser-tab with this thread and moving on.

Re:Told ya...

[Sciath]

You're wrong. Momo Theresa did in fact deny on purpose, people who were under her care medicinal aids including antibiotics and pain ameliorates. The "good news" about her was about as good one can find in the Old Testament. She was catholic and the catholic church and various affiliated church organizations have promoted her righteousness while engaging in a misinformation campaign to hide her horrific acts. She denied bedding to the sick, withheld medicines and personal care while promoting her organization. And it was not because of a lack of funds. It was because as a dedicated catholic nun she believes in the salvation found in the experience of "suffering". That suffering brings one closer to god and induces the sick and dying to reach for the salvation of god or Christ. To her suffering was an integral part of the faith experience which is one of the pillars of the catholic church. Which by coincidence is the exact opposite of Buddhism which promotes the elimination of suffering in this world.

Re:Told ya...

[redeIm]

The government doesn't need to ban guns in order to oppress the populace, because the people with guns don't seem to be doing shit about all these constitutional violations anyway. Some (not all) even support this nonsense in the name of fighting "terrorism." I guess the 2nd amendment is the only thing that matters to some of them.

Re:Told ya...

[Sciath]

You seem to ignore the fact that many of the needs her organization were met by donations, volunteers, etc. which cost her nothing. She professed a Spartan life but didn't emulate that personally. A majority of her "budget" could've been used to help the sick and dying but to her suffering was a saving grace. That was her sole (stated) objective, to bring people to god/Jesus. And evangelism via suffering was her intent. Period.

Re:Told ya...

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing will convince you, because your mind is firmly made up, no matter how much overwhelming evidence is presented. Simple fans or even ice were not given to those who were suffering.

Re:Told ya...

[bussdriver]

Slippery Slope is just something everybody should ban from use or simply learn what it is before bringing it up. Parent is correct to cite one when bringing it up. Skipping steps in the chain is invalid logic; however, people should be allowed to summarize and imply in an online posting and not create a long detailed formal syllogism every time they want to gloat... Besides:

As far as characterizations and predictions; that stuff is never logical. If you want to stick to deductive logic (real logic) then you can't do that much. A correctly diagnosed psychopath is likely to act like one and it is not wrong to say "I told you so" when the evidence bares out the prediction. What these people are doing is citing evidence of how accurate their past predictions are. Sure, that does not mean they arrived at it any better than random chance; that takes a track record, but you don't get one without by pointing out success. If you are psychic and that results in success, that is fine by me (it never will.) So, if you beat chance then it is skill and/or insight and SOME recognition is deserved. If only we kept records and referred to them so the talented people would be identified... but when we can, with pundits etc. we do not do this and so the same wrongheaded fools get the audience.

Re:Told ya...

[Anonymous Coward]

The idea that the NSA is spying on lots and lots of innocent Americans without a warrant was more than "random chance"; it's something our government had shown itself to be willing to do, it's something numerous people came forward and reported was happening before Snowden, and it's something that was truly unsurprising when you consider the Patriot Act and the government's overall freedom-infringing response to 9/11.

Heads should roll

[FoolishBluntman]

This shows how incredible out of control the CIA is.
I could almost accept that the CIA keeps this data to help with "foreign intelligence" in mind but if this data is available to both the FBI and DEA it is a clear violation of the CIA charter and should result with the director's head on the chopping block.

Re:Heads should roll

[Indy1]

Wrong agency - CIA and NSA are different agencies with (somewhat) different missions.

That said, the entire NSA, and along with anyone who enabled them, needs to fired / jailed / etc for blatant and unending violations of the Bill of Rights and federal law in general.

Re:Heads should roll

[msauve]

Uh, NSA != CIA.

Re:Heads should roll

[Anonymous Coward]

And how incredibly naive the population is, the smartest tech people I know thought I was a tinfoil hat wearer when I described the sort of things that were going on a year before the leak. They still don't seem to care.

Re:Heads should roll

[redeIm]

They're probably utterly ignorant of history, and can't come to simple conclusions on their own. Even someone who is ignorant of history should know that those with massive amounts of power will abuse it.

"Land of the free, home of the brave," huh? Not while most of the population is either apathetic or supports massive violations of the constitution and people's fundamental liberties.

Re:Heads should roll

[Ultracrepidarian]

Yes. The CIA performs the "wet work".

Working backwards from a "known" result

[rmdingler]

I find it reassuring that there's no danger this can be abused. Ahem.

Our worst fears are now realized.

The Snowden revelations regarding ubiquitous data collection have caused so little civil turmoil that the information is now to be shared with every Sheriff's Department from Bangor to the Bay Area.

Re:Working backwards from a "known" result

[Anonymous Coward]

The media has never been critical of a liberal administration.
they just look the other way.

Re:Working backwards from a "known" result

[Livius]

The media has never been critical of a liberal administration.

Because there hasn't been one in living memory.

Re:Working backwards from a "known" result

[AHuxley]

It gets and keeps the funding. Binney: 'The NSA's main motives: power and money' (19.08.2014)
http://www.dw.de/binney-the-ns...
"When you do the things that they do - dictionary select, like a Google query, you throw a bunch of words in and get a return. And if you do that for terrorism, you get everything in the haystack that has those words. So now you're buried - by orders of magnitude worse than you used to be. So you don't find them."
.... "Money. It takes a lot of money, you have to build up Bluffdale [the location of the NSA's data storage center, in Utah] to store all the data. If you collect all the data, you've got to store it, you have to hire more people to analyze it, you have to hire more contractors, managers to manage the flow. You have to start a big data initiative. It's an empire."
William Binney https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Its all about growing the NSA beyond its 1990's position in the US gov. No more just working to provide data to other mil and gov tasks.
The NSA seeks to run its own missions and be seen getting results, more funding and more political access.

Re:Working backwards from a "known" result

[mcrbids]

I find it interesting your choice of cities... you must be North Cal

Re:Working backwards from a "known" result

[rmdingler]

Interesting.

No. Vertexan.

From Ethan Allen to the oil field.

Re:Working backwards from a "known" result

[Anonymous Coward]

Man this is amazing. Does the EFF need any plumbing work done? Or houses painted?

Re:Working backwards from a "known" result

[countach74]

Far too few people know what "liberal" actually means.

Re:Working backwards from a "known" result

[Anonymous Coward]

Bangor is also a place in Maine, broham.

Re:Working backwards from a "known" result

[msauve]

Far too many people (at least in the US) think political opinion can only fall into "us" vs. "them."

Americans tend to think that "liberal" means "liberal, as in beer," and not "liberal, as in libre."

Re:Working backwards from a "known" result

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. Change for the sake of change is their main personality trait.

Re:Working backwards from a "known" result

[Anonymous Coward]

richard nixon was our last 'liberal' president...
not joking, that is just how debased and skewed our political spectrum has become...

Re: Working backwards from a "known" result

[Anonymous Coward]

much more than that. the entire military faced downsizing in the 2000s. so they asked their friends abroad to do something about it.
9/11 ensured the pork flow.

Time for 850 billion FoI requests

[Anonymous Coward]

I want to see every record that they have.

Re:Time for 850 billion FoI requests

[Anonymous Coward]

I want to see every record that they have.

Sorry, National Security exemption.....

Re:Time for 850 billion FoI requests

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, no security when all pigs in the nation can read it.

as i've said before....

[Anonymous Coward]

If you have voted for a republican or a democrat in the last 30 years or so, this is your fault.

YOU.

The signs were all there, you ignored them, and kept voting the same jokers in, perpetuating the same power structures, letting the same people get away with gross violations of the law that would get any one of us thrown in prison.

Now, welcome to the surveillance state. I hope you're happy with the results. But it gets better. It doesn't end here. We've seen, in other societies, where this goes. It doesn't end well.

But you don't care about that, do you? Because Emmy Awards! Because Jellyfish stung 250 people in one day!

Re:as i've said before....

[Anonymous Coward]

Minus one already?

You must have struck a nerve.

Two sides of the same coin.

Re:as i've said before....

[Anonymous Coward]

People would have to reconsider their worldview that "their" party is good and "the other" party is bad.

That's hard. It's easier to mod such views down to -1 and ignore them. Nobody wants to hear that they are partly responsible.

Re:as i've said before....

[HiThere]

Do you really think voting for a third party, or refusing to vote, makes any difference?

If nothing you do makes any difference, is it really your fault? There might have been something that would have made a difference, but voting isn't on that list. That became quite clear when they refused to even count the votes for Pat Paulson. (I suspect he would have won, but there's no way to tell.)

Re:as i've said before....

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you really think voting for a third party, or refusing to vote, makes any difference?

Voting for evil scumbags is certainly not the answer. Voting for third parties or even refusing to vote is better than actively supporting evil, and the former can send a message to the main parties to adopt some third party policies if enough people do it, even if they don't win.

It's a hell of a lot more productive than just supporting evil.

Re:as i've said before....

[Anonymous Coward]

In New Zealand, during our last election 3 years ago, 52% of the population didn't bother to vote. As a result, we have a National-led government fronted by John Key, voted for by approximately 24% of the population. To their minds, this means they are allowed to do whatever they want, whenever they want.

John Key, who has the worst memory you've ever heard of - he's been compared with Sergeant Schultz - yet all his friends say that he has one of the sharpest minds. He forgets nothing that can be used against you, and everything that can be used against him.

Spin. Everything is spin with this government. Bloody socialists are going to spend up, we're going to get a surplus - but don't ask us about borrowing millions a week just to keep the economy afloat.

No, refusing to vote is not the solution. Unfortunately, if you do vote, you'll likly fall into Arrow's Impossibility Theorem where any state, no matter how many political parties, will become a two-party state.

Re:as i've said before....

[Anonymous Coward]

No, refusing to vote is not the solution.

I didn't say it was. However, voting for evil scumbags is *worse* than not voting. The best course of action, in my opinion, is to vote for people who aren't evil scumbags, which necessarily will prevent you from voting for republicans or democrats.

Unfortunately, if you do vote, you'll likly fall into Arrow's Impossibility Theorem [wikipedia.org] where any state, no matter how many political parties, will become a two-party state.

That depends on how your voting system is set up. While all of them generally have this problem to some extent, some are still better than others. Nothing's perfect.

Re:as i've said before....

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, voting for non mainstream candidates and parties DOES and WOULD HAVE made a difference. Voting for those that speak against this corruption makes a difference, and voting out those that are known or strongly suspected of such acts sends a strong and clear message - if we catch you, you will LOSE. What sort of crazy person doesn't think that positive reinforcement of behavior works?

Re:as i've said before....

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you really think voting for a third party, or refusing to vote, makes any difference?

Voting for third and fourth parties makes a lot of difference in countries that don't have the american two-party system. You get about 5 parties competing for power in various coalitions. A lot more dynamic. And a party not letting go of a bad idea/leader can be locked out for a long time - without having "the other party" ruling alone in that extended period.

That is what you get with proportional representation, instead of the odd "first past the post"-principle.

Re:as i've said before....

[HiThere]

You've got it. The plurality wins system of voting is a near guarantee of only two parties, too. But those in power have no interest in reforming it.

Request: Do the math, please!

[Anonymous Coward]

Every story I've seen like this, for the past couple of years, I always wonder about the cost. I don't work at the large-scale when it comes to IT, so I never know what those sorts of budgets and cost infrastructures ramp up to. Can someone who DOES do that, chime in here?!?

I'm genuinely curious, and interested. What would the math look like on this?

What requirements, from bare metal to user interface, JUST for this system, are we talking about here!
Figure every FBI, DEA and 'above' Federal enforcement/intelligence agency has access. Bandwidth needs for the site in question?
Are we talking multiple locations for the content? Duplicated sites, or more? 1 east coast, mid-America, 1 west coast?
Have to figure the database throughput is pretty high as well, given this is the Government we're talking about here. Why skimp, especially when 'potential terrorists' was put on the line item for the funding.
What about personnel? How many DBA's, front-end programmers, sys-admins and data center monkeys is this gonna take to support?

This can't be small. At least, it doesn't seem like it would be. So what would it really take to put this sort of thing together? I have no question that it's possible, and likely true, I'd just like to know how much money this thing is burning through!

Re:Request: Do the math, please!

[Anonymous Coward]

Posting anon (I hope) But I work with data on sort of this scale.
I've got about 1 petabyte of data, 5 billion records, saved for 7 years.
It takes a team of 5 DBAs to keep the database working (patching, reorgs, dumping the 7 year +1 month data, idiot developers causing SQL deadlocks, etc)
About 50 people are required to deal with new feature requests, performance tuning, hardware failures, fuckups, etc,

850 billions records, if they were each 1 byte is 850 gb.
If they were on the size of my records, 170 petabytes. Team size scales pretty well, but I'd bet around 20 DBAs to keep the thing running, about 300 people total.
You could run it in a single data center, but most likely they have two or more to have physical redundancy
(and guaranteed at least one of them thinks russia will nuke both data centers, whether russia thinks so or not).

I'd bet the budget is 1 billion or so, talked about 20 million to run ours. (Salary, benefits, hardware, Accenture, IBM, etc)

Re:Request: Do the math, please!

[AHuxley]

You saw the DEA do it with phone call records.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-po... Sept 4 2013
".... to place its employees in drug-fighting units around the country. Those employees sit alongside Drug Enforcement Administration agents and local detectives and supply them with the phone data from as far back as 1987.""
Thats just one tiny project with once set of data.
Water news http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...
Power news http://www.zerohedge.com/news/...
Thats just for one classic storage site thats in the news a lot.
Re So what would it really take to put this sort of thing together?
"The ultimate goal of the NSA is total population control" 11 July 2014
http://www.theguardian.com/com...
"At least 80% of all audio calls, not just metadata, are recorded and stored in the US, says whistleblower William Binney – that's a 'totalitarian mentality'"
Should give an average reader an idea of the US internal scale to store, track, index, search, voice print, call to, call from, other numbers, work back from hops surrounding people of interest.
ie well funded, all of the USA, over years, aspects of calls stored for years ready to be found in storage if seen at a protest, near a protest or near a person who was near a person at a protest.
ie you just need a lot of tame Room 641A like access https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:Request: Do the math, please!

[Anonymous Coward]

guestimate 1 trillion records, perhaps 10kb compressed each (lets say they're long wide records with textual info, etc.), that's 10k terabytes. Imagine a rack holding say 200 drives, each average 5T that's about 10 racks---or about the size of a small sized data center. With some hashing and/or partitioning scheme, the software to search all that in parallel isn't that complicated (or install something like Pivotal on it). Limitations would include non-equality joins.

the actual data center would likely be several times that, since... well, government moneh.

Re:Request: Do the math, please!

[Anonymous Coward]

While I appreciate your link and content grouping, you missed the point of the post. What would the realistic hard number costs be associated with these programs?

Re:Request: Do the math, please!

[AHuxley]

Hi AC re "realistic hard number costs" would all be hidden over federal, gov and mil projects or just buying in bulk from the private sector.
Water and power usage at one site thats in the news is about all that can be worked back from.
"‘Black budget’ summary details U.S. spy network’s successes, failures and objectives" (August 29, 2013)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
hints at "$52.6 billion “black budget” for fiscal 2013" but that could be for very limited number for US internal consumption over a subset of mil/gov projects.
ie the US gov gets all domestic data thanks to tame telcos. The costs of storing aspects of every call would be small over decades as the above linked DEA news showed.

It's not "parallel construction"

[Anonymous Coward]

However, questions have been raised over its potential for abuse in what is known as "parallel construction," a process in which agencies use surveillance resources in domestic investigations, and then later cover it up by creating a different evidence trail to use in court.

In any legitimate court this is known as perjury. Unfortunately, most US courts look the other way if it is law enforcement or government officials doing the lying.

Re:It's not "parallel construction"

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought there was an exemption for "inevitable discovery". Improperly collected evidence can be admissible if it would have been discovered anyway, by other means. Although I think the exemption only covers misdemeanor action, not perjury and so forth.

Re:It's not "parallel construction"

[Anonymous Coward]

That's utterly preposterous, and shows how useless our courts are. The means in which they collect evidence is very much relevant. Whether or not they would have collected it otherwise is irrelevant.

Re:It's not "parallel construction"

[Anonymous Coward]

"Parallel construction" should be treated as treason.

Re:It's not "parallel construction"

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought there was an exemption for "inevitable discovery". Improperly collected evidence can be admissible if it would have been discovered anyway, by other means. Although I think the exemption only covers misdemeanor action, not perjury and so forth.

To a certain extent, this is true. However I believe (obligatory I am not a lawyer disclaimer) that inevitable discovery does not apply in cases of a "fishing" expedition, since there is no crime under investigation until AFTER incriminating data was discovered by trolling the NSA's "secret" database. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruit_of_the_poison_tree

Who didn't see this coming?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is how it always plays out with law enforcement, once the Data is there, it'll get in the hands of everyday officers. Thankful they can be trusted not to abuse the system, because it is rife for abuse.

Re:Who didn't see this coming?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ripe for. Rife with. Now you know.

But, but..

[ShaunC]

I thought they only collected tiny bits of metadata of little concern to the average citizen, only when foreigners are involved, and that it was only ever used for superduper terrorist investigations. Oh, the local sheriff has access, too? Drug enforcement and all that?

Quelle surprise.

Re:But, but..

[AHuxley]

That local Fusion center https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... will help move real world local private/public data up to the federal level :)

Search for me but not for thee

[jcrb]

Oh sure they have a wonderful system for searching what they want to search and can't be troubled to search what they should be able to but don't want to..

http://www.judicialwatch.org/p...
"Department of Justice attorneys for the Internal Revenue Service told Judicial Watch on Friday that Lois Lerner’s emails, indeed all government computer records, are backed up by the federal government in case of a government-wide catastrophe. The Obama administration attorneys said that this back-up system would be too onerous to search. "

The saying "Laws are for the little people" used to be funny, now, not so much.

Re:Search for me but not for thee

[HiThere]

The saying "Laws are for the little people" used to be funny, now, not so much.

Was only ever funny if you still had your eyes closed. OTOH, it *is* getting worse.

IPFREELY!

[Anonymous Coward]

When it comes to subversion, it is more important to watch and monitor those in power, correct?

So, the government should be doing this too all their own damn employees, aka preventing and monitoring people like Snowden and Co.

So, I for one, call for the government Implant Program For Researching Eavesdropping on Employee Logistics for You, IPFREELY will revolutionize government because we the people will know which asswipe and asshole needs to have their butt kicked out of the government and put into prison.

IPFREELY! Give the each government employee a butt implant today! We need to track their asses better than they can track ours!

Those with more power need to be watched even more than those with less power...

Re:IPFREELY!

[Anonymous Coward]

Prevent corruption and abuse of power using Butt Implants powered by iApple and Google+, aka your phones?... The supreme commander should be bugged 24/7 to prevent illegal abuse of the most powerful office in the world.

haha, you got a Butt Implant!

Parallel BS

[LessThanObvious]

( "Parallel Construction" = Lying = Prosecutorial Malfeasance = A Crime ) It makes my skin crawl knowing that these guys are so out of control that we have an official term for lying to the judge and defense counsel about the source of evidence. If the NSA hears about a delivery of 500 Kilos of drugs and they intercept it, I'm fine with that, but unless the actual source of the information is disclosed it should be a crime to fake the investigation process to get it into court. If they can't prosecute, oh well, seize the drugs and call it a win.

Re:Parallel BS

[redeIm]

If the NSA hears about a delivery of 500 Kilos of drugs and they intercept it, I'm fine with that

I'm not. The NSA should have nothing to do with drugs, and shouldn't be collecting all this 'metadata' on people in the first place.

Re:Parallel BS

[onproton]

I think the most frightening thing about parallel construction is how few shits the officers appear to give about it (from the article). "But two senior DEA officials defended the program, and said trying to "recreate" an investigative trail is not only legal but a technique that is used almost daily." or "Parallel construction is a law enforcement technique we use every day," one official said. "It's decades old, a bedrock concept." - since when is my question.

Re:Parallel BS

[Anonymous Coward]

They not only gather all the metadata, but no one will or would ever question them as to any of its veracity.

They send the info, you're arrested with the 500 kilos of cement bags you were delivering to a shop, three houses get shot up in the meantime, and by the time you're in court every last ounce of it has will have been cocaine all along.

Re:Parallel BS

[LessThanObvious]

...and I thought "Fruit of the Poisonous Tree" doctrine was a bedrock concept. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F... If investigators can show that they would have arrived at the same conclusion or would have found the evidence through legal means they can get around it, but the judge has to know all the facts to determine if investigators discovery was truly inevitable.

writs of assistance

[harvey the nerd]

NSA surveillience used by domestic LEOs function as writs of assistance, the traitorous general search warrants expressly forbidden by the Founders and a major cause of the American Revolution. No matter what title they have, some officials need to be tried then shot and/or hanged.

Re:writs of assistance

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

Government, glomming on more power whenever it can, has long viewed your records and activities held by wire in companies as not private.

Yet as more and more of life is virtual, constitutional protections against search should travel along with you into cyberspace.

Why create a virtual world just to give government, hungry for power, a virtual world in which to establish a Panopticon?

Re: writs of assistance

[Anonymous Coward]

this just put you on the priority 1 terrorist list. look forward to some groping at the airport.

Don't do it

[Anonymous Coward]

This article is just a honeypot for the NSA to add more records to their databases.

oops.

Re: Don't do it

[Anonymous Coward]

if you read this nsa-gestapo;well have a bad day snd dutifully extend my record,assholes!

admission of guilt?

[ebonum]

The NSA is supposed to only collect information on foreigners. Right? So how could their DB be of any use to domestic law enforcement? Or perhaps I'm a little naive.

Re:admission of guilt?

[onproton]

There hasn't been much of an "admission" of anything from these agencies, let alone guilt or wrongdoing. The surveillance practices currently employed, as shown by documents leaked by Edward Snowden and others, take a "collect it all" kind of approach in which they assert that they must have the proverbial haystack before they can find the needle. In fact, data on innocents is far more abundant than even the data stored on targeted individuals, and this includes many, many American citizens.

Re:admission of guilt?

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone in the US that comes in contact with the person then is caught in the surveillance and they admitted that they will collect data on us citizens up to 2-3 jumps away from the original subject so the surveillance spreads like a virus. If the decided to collect data on Kevin Bacon we all would be watch :/

Re:admission of guilt?

[symbolic]

Why do we accept this argument that they must have and abuse the haystack so that they can find the needle? It was discredited the day that it became known. Now what we have is a completely corruption of our justice system.

Re:admission of guilt?

[Anonymous Coward]

The keyword here is "supposed" Plus, it doesn't stop an ally collecting information on Americans and them just doing an `rsync` of it (and vice versa) hence not breaking any law...

Re:admission of guilt?

[onproton]

My opinion? In short - because we as a society have completely lost touch with reality. Many either 1. don't care, 2. don't know, or 3. are complicit. The conversation is going on, but not everyone wants to get up off the couch to come to the table. It's a complex issue that requires more than 140 characters; it requires thought about consequences and compromise - I've found that not many people are really interested in thinking deeply about these things.

Google-like?

[Walter White]

A "Google-like" search engine? Does that mean they are serving ads to the law enforcement agencies that use it?

Re:Google-like?

[Nyder]

A "Google-like" search engine? Does that mean they are serving ads to the law enforcement agencies that use it?

I don't know, but I wonder if they honor DMCA takedown requests....

Re:Google-like?

[Anonymous Coward]

> A "Google-like" search engine? Does that mean they are serving ads to the law enforcement agencies that use it?

Yes. The companies that benefit from this situation need to keep selling more and more equipment, so every query is implicitly an advertisement for increasing the system's capabilities.

Re:Google-like?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yup, for surplus military gear.

They're all the same...

[Grog6]

They are the modern Gestapo; Orwell just missed it by a few years.

The future will be the image from the book:

A Boot, Stamping on a Face, Forever.

Re:They're all the same...

[Anonymous Coward]

>A Boot, Stamping on a Face... ...of folks like Douglas Arthur McCain...forever.

We The People

[Nyder]

We The People need to take our government back. Our leaders have failed us, our politicians have failed up. Time for them to be removed and place. The NSA needs to be removed and dismantled in it's current form.

Our government is the terrorist problem, as it refuses to obey the constitution and puts corporations over the people.

I am not saying we need to do this violently, but we have to do this, no matter how it goes down. Our government won't fix itself, it's up to WE THE PEOPLE.

Re:We The People

[Anonymous Coward]

I am not saying we need to do this violently, but we have to do this, no matter how it goes down. Our government won't fix itself, it's up to WE THE PEOPLE.

I see what you did there... making sure that your comment doesn't get flagged in ICREACH as 'a violent extremist'... well played, sir, well played...

Re:We The People

[Anonymous Coward]

Are YOU the people going to do anything about it or just post online on what you/others SHOULD do?

Note: going outside and holding a camera to see what may/not happen is not action..

Re:We The People

[Anonymous Coward]

You know that will never happen.
It WILL turn violent, regardless. More to the point, THEY will make it turn violent to give them an excuse for retaliation.

Most Americans love going "FUCK YEAH AMERICA!", but if they were really asked to stand up and defend their country, will they fuck. Even if they had guns and a complete new-government given right to kill old-government.

It would, quite truly, become an anarchy. Mostly because they could and will make it one if it were to come to that.

First Link in Article Bullshit

[retroworks]

What's with the first link? BS? The second link is about DEA. We all know DEA is chasing marijuana crime because the legislative branch needs to pass better pot sale laws. Do I think the DEA is tracking my political opinions? No. Could they with this software? Yeah. But let's fix the marijuana laws before we freak out and tell the government to stop tracking "crime".

Terrorists?

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought that the NSA surveillance information was being collected in our War on Terror, Seem that this rational is no longer the case. Now it is the War on Personal Privacy.

And here we go ...

[gstoddart]

When they start these things, they say "oh, this will only be used for this, under strict controls and nothing else".

People who say that they'll eventually abuse it are dismissed as ridiculous, but then eventually since they have all of this information they might as well use it for something.

And if they have to lie about how they did it to conceal what they have, so be it. Because, after, they're the good guys, right?

This is a complete and utter undermining of the fourth amendment and the notion that a just government doesn't spy on you "just in case".

The US has been transformed into a police state. Worse, they've helped turn the rest of the world into one too.

Congratulations, America, you've pretty much killed off free societies around the world, and brought in your own special kind of fascism.

Your spy agencies and law enforcement are truly living up to all of the scary imagery people have been decrying for years.

Papers please, comrade. If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear.

Re:And here we go ...

[Anonymous Coward]

People who say that they'll eventually abuse it are dismissed as ridiculous, but then eventually since they have all of this information they might as well use it for something.

Whenever a controversial law is proposed, and its supporters, when confronted with an egregious abuse it would permit, use a phrase along the lines of 'Perhaps in theory, but the law would never be applied in that way' - they're lying. They intend to use the law that way as early and as often as possible.

- Meringuoid's Law, first formulated on Slashdot in 2005.

My take is that even Congress falls for it. They vote for the laws but don't read them, nor do they particularly care what they say, and they certainly don't care for the implications of the laws they pass, except insofar as their vote affects their polling numbers. The people who "intend to use the law that way as early and as often as possible" are the the back-office people drafting the legislation. And I'm not sure if that should make me even more depressed or sad than the alternative explanation that Congress knows what they're doing.

name all your kids from now on like this

[Anonymous Coward]

NSA-dick {insert middle and last name)

then let them search

The New America

[Anonymous Coward]

What this really means is that when US Senator X kills prostitute Y and calls Lawyer Z the trail of evidence is clear: X did Y and asked Z to cover it up.

No escape for US Senator X nor US President P.

The hangman's noose closes on their necks.

Welcome to the New America.

Re:The New America

[Skidborg]

When it comes to that I'm sure they'll be just as careful as the IRS is with their records.

Not much for critical thinking..

[Anonymous Coward]

That is a very important fact. These things happen not because of deliberate malevolence

This assumption is just as bad as the idiot claiming it's all because of [satanism|luciferianism|illuminati|masons|jews] etc... Keep writing off as accidental, and I'll keep saying you are total idiot.

I'd surely agree that we don't know motives, because a large part of something being a conspiracy is that the negotiations and motives are maintained in secrecy. Your claim of non-malevolence is just as idiotic as the next persons claim of pure malevolence because you don't know any better than they do, and in true fashion for an idiot you both believe your opinion trumps facts and refuse to look into facts.

Unfortunately for you, your belief is much more dangerous because it implies passivity as a response and removes accountability.

I wish I could claim that you were simply a sock puppet, but the reality is that many people believe the same as you. You can't question bullshit assumptions of X that include the tag line "smart people believe X".

Re:Not much for critical thinking..

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes I do know better than they do because I understand human nature better than they do.
Nobody decides they want to be evil today. Even Hitler thought of himself as a good guy doing the right thing for Germany.

> it implies passivity as a response and removes accountability.

And that, of course, is total bullshit. Only an evil person would think that.

Re:Not much for critical thinking..

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody decides they want to be evil today.

They might not think they're evil, but they might want power. That's definitely a malicious intention.

Re:Not much for critical thinking..

[Anonymous Coward]

> They might not think they're evil, but they might want power. That's definitely a malicious intention.

No, the pursuit of power is not inherently evil. It depends on the means.
If it were, then any person looking for a promotion at work and anyone campaigning in an election would have malicious intent.

Re:Not much for critical thinking..

[redeIm]

It depends on the means.

And their means are evil. Way to miss the point.

Re:Not much for critical thinking..

[redeIm]

Also, this pursuit of power *over the populace* is evil.

Price for business access?

[Anonymous Coward]

I and the business I represent would like to purchase access. How much does it cost for those outside the usual intel/insider tading network?

Truth and Consequence

[Anonymous Coward]

>> and then later cover it up by creating a different evidence trail to use in court.

To the extent officers and agencies can be identified as using this data and misrepresenting its use in court, ALL convictions and arrests by those officers and agencies can be reviewed in a court and damages can be assessed. Retroactively.

Can you hear me now?

Re:Truth and Consequence

[messymerry]

Except for one wee little problem: THE COURTS ARE IN ON IT!!!

Platonic Chain for LEOs

[Anonymous Coward]

Platonic Chain One very underrated anime.

"innocent American citizens"

[mtthwbrnd]

You are only innocent until we can prove you guilty, of something, at sometime, and we are searching as hard as we can to prove each and everyone of you guilty of something, at sometime.

We may even need to change to law to issue retroactive fines for infringements. This will go a long way towards filling the budget deficit in policing which will be created by Google Cars obeying even our silliest of traffic laws which we designed specifically to increase revenue.

technology: Here to help, here to serve!

Apologies from a former denier...

[jopsen]

So all that "slippery slope" shit from 10 years ago doesn't seem so stupid now, does it?

As one of those sheep 10 years ago.. I would like to apologizes.


After Snowden my view of US intelligence efforts changed dramatically.

iSCREACH

[Anonymous Coward]

ICREACH - hyper extended and gnarled icy cold offhand. Quite often accompanied by a knife equipped primary hand.

Yes we knew

[SuperKendall]

You didn't know all along... you worried about it, you feared for it, but you didn't know

Only retarded idiots like yourself do not KNOW the inevitable will occur.

It affects all other choices you make, which is sad for you.

You guys know nothing

[Anonymous Coward]

This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to surveillance tools that domestic law enforcement is using, trust me I know, you guys would be even more chilled if you knew what I did

Parallel BS

[Anonymous Coward]

If the NSA hear about a big drug transport, the cops can't use that in court. It is an 'illegal search', similar to the cop breaking into a random house and stumbling over the drug-smuggling plan.

But they can use this indirectly. They know the smugglers use a certain truck, so they decide to stop trucks for "emission tests" or some such that day. And they know where the stuff is hidden, so they can accidentally find it. So in court, "they found 500kg while doing a routine inspection". The defense will never get anywhere with "the dope was so well hidden, it must have been foul play!". They can always claim the drug dog noticed something - even if it didn't. Or the good old "anonymous/insider tip". The driver goes to prison, the real smuggler is executed by the drug cartel for loosing such a big shipment. The contract killer is then picked up by cops who "just happened to be outside, and heard the shooting". Everybody (except addicts) is satisfied . . .

Correction

[Camael]

Basically, she enjoyed inflicting pain on other people by denying access to painkillers. All while living quite a cushy life herself.

That's pretty much a lie, and character assassination. There is no evidence anywhere that she "enjoyed inflicting pain on other people". The quotes attributed to her and the Slate article in particular (which is suspect, seeing that the article's author wrote a book "The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice" and obviously has a vested interest in drumming up sales and controversy) does not say this.

As for the part about "denying access to painkillers" - this is misleading. Context, my dear, context. As stated in her Wikipedia entry :-

the use of opioids in India for managing cancer pain remains—ten years after Mother Teresa's death—highly problematic for legal, regulatory, cultural, and other reasons (including supply interruptions, harsh punishments imposed for even minor infractions of the rules, and the fear of addiction by health workers). Despite the lack of sophisticated analgesic regimes, volunteers (including those with western medical qualifications and experience) reported that her Home for the Dying was a place of joy not sadness.

Apart from that, I do not understand why her failings seem to offend you so much. It seems almost personal.

Re:Correction

[Cyberax]

There is a plenty of evidence ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C... ). And she REPEATED that quote several times, it's not disputed.

As for fucking context, she could have worked towards making opiates access easier. She didn't. And read the actual memoirs of sisters in her Homes, where 'joy' meant people screaming their lungs out from pain.

Re:Correction

[Cyberax]

Oh, and if Slate is not enough for you, here's Forbes: http://www.forbes.com/2010/08/... It's even more damning.

What say the people on the inside?

[Camael]

Have you worked in the MIC? I grew-up in it, served, and went on to do DoD contracting once I got out. Nothing crazy high level classification, run of the mill secret stuff and it has been obvious from the inside for a long, long time. Which is why I got out.

Which raises an interesting question- how do those people working for the NSA and other intel agencies reconcile their conscience with the work that they are doing? All these systems etc need operatives to run, to gather information, to decrypt and analyse etc. This kind of work I would imagine requires people with a more than average level of intelligence and education. Sure they must bear witness to the abuses being perpetrated on their own people. How do they sleep at night?

Even the Stasi operatives at the time when East Germany existed have the comfort of knowing that their cooperation was secured by state sanctioned penalties. These NSA people have no such excuse.

Re:What say the people on the inside?

[Rakhar]

Decentralization. It's not like the people supplying the data get to directly see how it's used. I'm sure plenty of them aren't even aware of just who they're supplying data to. And the people compiling the data don't necessarily know where it comes from or what the output will be used for.

You can guess an awful lot, but hindsight is 20/20 and all that.

Re:What say the people on the inside?

[AmiMoJo]

Thanks to Snowden's leaks we know that NSA employees do have concerns about what they are doing, but as ever the chain of command and "everyone else is doing it too" seems to be enough. Well, for everyone except Snowden and maybe a few others.

Re: What say the people on the inside?

[Anonymous Coward]

you might want to ask larry wall of perl fame. my best guess is MONEY.

I do not know how you can laugh ...

[Taco Cowboy]

America has turned into a police state and you guys are laughing

I, as an American, find it very hard to swallow the hard fact that my country is no longer the Land of the Free nor Home for the Brave

With 850 Billion (and growing) dossiers to search, anyone in any of the so-called law enforcement agencies get to pry open things that they are not supposed to know, maybe even things that have been erroneously included in the dossier
 
... and you are laughing !!

Re:I do not know how you can laugh ...

[flyneye]

The part that has me giggling is; cops are so fucking ignorant, it's only a matter of seconds before one of their Log/Pass gets spread around long enough for anyone on the internet to D/L anyones details.
NSA is stupid for providing it
FBI is stupid for approving it
Local cops are just plain stupid.

Re: I do not know how you can laugh ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Icreach user here. The records are not dossiers, but call metadata, as in this number called this other number. Or did you think there were 850 billion people on earth? Also, congress mandated NSA shared data after 9/11, and icreach was the answer.

Re: I do not know how you can laugh ...

[oodaloop]

Icreach user here. Records are not dossiers, but call metadata, as in this number called that other number. Or did you think there were 850 billion people alive? Also, congress mandated NSA share data after 9/11, and icreach was created to do that.

Re:I do not know how you can laugh ...

[orgelspieler]

'Sheriff flyneye, this is special agent Fredricks wanting to verify your login credentials for ICREACH. Our database shows that you still have the default password of "Password1" which should be changed immediately. ... Oh, OK. ... "kitty69"? ... Yes, that's acceptable. Sorry for the confusion.'

Re:I do not know how you can laugh ...

[XLT_Frank]

America has turned into a police state and you guys are laughing

I, as an American, find it very hard to swallow the hard fact that my country is no longer the Land of the Free nor Home for the Brave

With 850 Billion (and growing) dossiers to search, anyone in any of the so-called law enforcement agencies get to pry open things that they are not supposed to know, maybe even things that have been erroneously included in the dossier ... and you are laughing !!

I have been watching a lot of Continuum lately and that show has been ringing true as of late. This article reminds me of ARC.... except that this probably doesn't work that well.

Re: I do not know how you can laugh ...

[onproton]

Icreach user here. The records are not dossiers, but call metadata, as in this number called this other number. Or did you think there were 850 billion people on earth? Also, congress mandated NSA shared data after 9/11, and icreach was the answer.

Not sure if this is satire or not, but if you have actually used ICReach I am curious about how easy it is to get information on U.S. citizens through the databases with "minimization" etc

Re: I do not know how you can laugh ...

[oodaloop]

Not satire. US person number will look like 703-XXX-XXXX or something like that. Lets you know the number is known and is associated with a US person. You can also label a number as US and it will then be masked. There are other safeguards as well.

Re: I do not know how you can laugh ...

[onproton]

So there are some that haven't been identified as US persons and floating around the database? Also how does searching for a minimized record work - ex. would it still come up in a search if you typed the name/number even if it is masked?

Re:I do not know how you can laugh ...

[Anonymous Coward]

When exactly America was the "land of the free"?

400 years ago when native population was killed and had their land stolen by immigrants?

300 years ago when the significant part of the population were slaves forcibly brought from Africa?

100 years ago when people fighting for workers rights were constantly harassed and authorities did nothing?

50 years ago when people were sentenced to jail for having a different political opinion?

The only difference is that now a white capitalist male is at the receiving end of the tyranny.

Sick and tired...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sick and tired of reading about all this shit. All I ever see is a bunch of p*****s (sorry to say it) whining about whatever amendment or right was broken in the so called "land of free" bull shit, which politician/president/MP/whatever others should have voted for from the same list of corrupted wankers, and for the few that think they're "home of the brave" bullshit or will make fuck all difference, taking a camera and asking for trouble on the streets (Wow!! ..)

Are you people ever going to do something about this? I mean really DO something about this or just sit on your behinds nagging and whining some more, holding to the false hope that you were ever in a "free" and "democratic" collection of states? If not, then please take your whining elsewhere.

Yes this is leaning more towards flamewars but I'm trying my best to hold back.. but seriously I'm just sick and tired of reading about this.

HAHA Fuck them

[Anonymous Coward]

Silly Americans, tried to tell them years ago that they don't even own their country ever since 1913, and they just wouldn't listen.

Shown them the research materials, told them what to search for:
who owns the federal reserve
who are you really paying taxes to
why you don't have to pay taxes
the 1913 coup
who owns america
who owns wall street
who owns hollywood
who owns congress (hint: all zionist jews)
the list goes on

And what did they do? Pretend they were somehow special and would live well forever, oh well we tried, but who cares, the US is now just another typical dying empire, don't think this one will even last 300 years.

If you don't learn from history then you don't deserve a future.

JOE BIDEN for 2016

[Anonymous Coward]

Joe Biden is a square shooter! Joe Biden for 2016!

250 in a day?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's a lot!

FTFA

[BringsApples]

The unit of the DEA that distributes the information is called the Special Operations Division, or SOD. Two dozen partner agencies comprise the unit, including the FBI, CIA, NSA, Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Homeland Security. It was created in 1994 to combat Latin American drug cartels and has grown from several dozen employees to several hundred.

SO the FBI, CIA, NSA, IRS, and DHS all work together to stop drug trafficers. There's a conspiracy theory if I ever saw one...

Does this actually surprise ANYONE?

[Anonymous Coward]

It shouldn't