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Obama Changed Rules Regarding Raw Intelligence, Allowing NSA To Share Raw Data With US's Other 16 Intelligence Agencies (schneier.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Schneier on Security: President Obama has changed the rules regarding raw intelligence, allowing the NSA to share raw data with the U.S.'s other 16 intelligence agencies. The new rules significantly relax longstanding limits on what the N.S.A. may do with the information gathered by its most powerful surveillance operations, which are largely unregulated by American wiretapping laws. These include collecting satellite transmissions, phone calls and emails that cross network switches abroad, and messages between people abroad that cross domestic network switches. The change means that far more officials will be searching through raw data. Essentially, the government is reducing the risk that the N.S.A. will fail to recognize that a piece of information would be valuable to another agency, but increasing the risk that officials will see private information about innocent people. Here are the new procedures. This rule change has been in the works for a while. Here are two blog posts from April discussing the then-proposed changes.

3 of 205 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Thanks, Obama! by MightyMartian · · Score: 4, Interesting

    You are orders of a magnitude more likely to die from heart disease than from a terror attack. If you're talking about threats to society, then I'd argue your bigger threat is your nearest McDonalds or Burger King. For fucks sake, the sugar industry probably kills or harms more people in a month with its now-revealed war on dietary science than all the terror attacks in the US, Canada and Western Europe in the last half century. If you want to find evil villains, I'd argue you'll find more in a half mile stretch of Wall Street than in half the hell holes of the world.

    You've proven my point very well, when you define things by grades of evil, rather than by actual statistical likelihood, you end up believing there are child molesters in every alley and every shopping mall is about to explode in a hail of nail bombs. Meanwhile, companies are adding vast amounts of sugar to many foods we buy, leading to obesity and diabetes rates that will harm and even kill millions of people.

    --
    The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
  2. Re:Thanks, Obama! by GLMDesigns · · Score: 4, Interesting

    That's not necessarily the point. A black person is order's of magnitude more likely to be killed by a young black man than a white policeman - and yet look at BLM. Also, it is not irrational to be concerned about islamo-fascist terrorism. One because it exists. And secondly because others say "nothing to see here, move along."

    Saying and doing nothing about evil because it's significantly minor is not an answer. The amount of black and Jewish people killed by the KKK was statistically insignificant - maybe 5-6000 over 80 years. And yet the violence, the existence of "strange fruit" matters. And it matters more than highway deaths.

    --
    If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
    Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
  3. The meme is the message by Xenographic · · Score: 4, Interesting

    That's especially funny.

    Because I believe I explained how this kind of nonsense works in my comment from just under a week ago, quoted in relevant part:

    I have secret evidence that your secret evidence is completely bogus. This same secret evidence also indicates that you secretly wet the bed last night. And 20 organizations have signed off on it.

    People who watch the "news" are like 50 shades behind everything going on. You guys have no idea how hilarious this is while waiting for you to catch up. But the real joke here is that there are people who actually think that CNN & BuzzFeed's "raw intelligence" of Trump pissing on Obama's bed is real. Corroborating evidence? We have a video of someone who gave Trump a golden shower in 2011! (quasi-SFW, despite what you might think)

    Just don't read this guy's explanation of how it was sourced from nonsense they fabricated based on this old TIL on Reddit (amazing how history repeats itself...). But yes, someone can then feel free to link me to BuzzFeed & others "debunking" that one on the basis that the 4chan post laughing about their first victim is newer than the document they wrote during the primaries.

    And then we can laugh at how they don't totally "debunk" the dossier based on the fact that they can't corroborate anything worth a damn in it, save maybe that it was created by someone doing an opposition report on Trump who got paid more the longer it was. That way we can all ignore all the more mundane items in the report that were proven to be nonsense. Anyhow, there are far more interesting things to research while everyone else is still wading through the "leaks" and yellow journalism. Feel free to keep wading through the stream, hoping to uncover nuggets of truth. I don't know about you, but after that sort of filth, I need a shower.