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850 Billion NSA Surveillance Records Searchable By Domestic Law Enforcement

Posted by Unknown on from the you're-a-criminal dept.

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.

27 of 207 comments (clear)

  1. ICREACH? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    I always knew Apple was involved in this.

    1. Re:ICREACH? by aralin · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      --
      If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
    2. Re:ICREACH? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

    3. Re:ICREACH? by aralin · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

      --
      If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
  2. Told ya... by houstonbofh · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

    1. Re:Told ya... by redeIm · · Score: 4, Insightful

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

    2. Re:Told ya... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

    3. Re:Told ya... by Jane+Q.+Public · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

    4. Re:Told ya... by Charliemopps · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    5. Re:Told ya... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

    6. Re:Told ya... by rtb61 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

      --
      Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
    7. Re:Told ya... by bill_mcgonigle · · Score: 4, Insightful


      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?

      --
      My God, it's Full of Source!
      OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
  3. Working backwards from a "known" result by rmdingler · · Score: 4, Insightful
    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.

    --
    Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.

    Ernest Hemingway

    1. Re:Working backwards from a "known" result by Livius · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The media has never been critical of a liberal administration.

      Because there hasn't been one in living memory.

  4. as i've said before.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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!

  5. Re:Heads should roll by redeIm · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  6. Search for me but not for thee by jcrb · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    --
    -jon
  7. Parallel BS by LessThanObvious · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ( "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.

    1. Re:Parallel BS by redeIm · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

  8. Re:Request: Do the math, please! by AHuxley · · Score: 4, Informative

    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/...

    --
    Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
  9. admission of guilt? by ebonum · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  10. Google-like? by Walter+White · · Score: 4, Funny

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

  11. They're all the same... by Grog6 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

    --
    Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
  12. We The People by Nyder · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    --
    Be seeing you...
  13. And here we go ... by gstoddart · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    --
    Lost at C:>. Found at C.
  14. I do not know how you can laugh ... by Taco+Cowboy · · Score: 4, Informative

    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 !!

    --
    Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
    1. Re:I do not know how you can laugh ... by flyneye · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

      --
      *Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!