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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.
Most open and transparent president ever, just with your data, not his.
Now more important that ever. Encrypt everything, no matter how mundane. The government is in a not-so-subtle war against the populace.
Ever hear of the Strategy of Tension? Operation Gladio? Do you really think this will decrease terror attacks? Has tearing the bill of rights to shreds been decreasing the number of terror attacks so far?
Convenient, they don't even need to go to the trouble of parallel construction anymore! And the old argument of "don't be so paranoid, the NSA doesn't care about you" goes right out the door. Now your local Sheriff gets to find out when you text your buddy about smoking a bowl, and unlike the NSA, he does care and might have decide to pay you a visit.
As if it wasn't time to encrypt every communication already, it's definitely time to start now.
I think the more salient point is whether or not terror attacks represent any significant risk at all. Now I'll admit when someone Jihadi drives a truck into a crowd of people, that certainly creates some casualties, and by consequence creates a significant amount of fear. But what are the real odds of any resident of a Western country dying in a terrorist attack. In reality, the odds are infinitesimal. Now dying from a heart attack or stroke, or hell, even choking or highway fatalities, those represent massive killers, with huge numbers of casualties with huge costs for society. And yet, here we are, with our stupid Savannah ape brains, unable to discern a meaningful and present threat to our person from a threat that's unlikely to harm you or anyone you know even to the second or third degree ever.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Nowadays, you can't even have a couple of Romanian prostitutes piss on you in a Moscow hotel without people finding out and pretending it's a big deal. Sad!
You are welcome on my lawn.
So, remember how the FISA court is essentially a rubberstamp for surveillance warrants?
As in they have only refused 0.03% of warrant requests?
Well, guess what warrant the FISA court did refuse?
The Guardian has learned that the FBI applied for a warrant from the foreign intelligence surveillance (Fisa) court over the summer in order to monitor four members of the Trump team suspected of irregular contacts with Russian officials. The Fisa court turned down the application asking FBI counter-intelligence investigators to narrow its focus. According to one report, the FBI was finally granted a warrant in October, but that has not been confirmed, and it is not clear whether any warrant led to a full investigation.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jan/10/fbi-chief-given-dossier-by-john-mccain-alleging-secret-trump-russia-contacts
WTF?
Why must something be done?
We have limited financial resources, if spending those same resources on a different problem will save more lives, doesn't it make sense to put the money where it will do the most good? Fighting terrorism costs a fortune, and has a track record of being extremely ineffectual. There are many more places where many more lives could be saved for a fraction of the cost, and all without giving up all our civil liberties in the process.
The Republicans won't make noise about this because they want it just as much as the Democrats.
You seem to think there's an actual difference between the 2 parties on issues like this, there isn't. Both parties want a full on police state, politics is all about control, nobody in politics wants less control, they all want more.
That's where end to end encryption is invented for. Apple, Google, etc. can not read the data themselves.
Phone conversations USED to be private and the authorities couldn't listen in, of course that was when people still thought the constitution meant something, so it's no surprise nobody still believes in such quaint ideas.
Enjoy your encryption while it lasts, I figure we only have a few years left before anyone using encryption that isn't intentionally backdoored will be labelled a criminal and arrested.
The CHILDREN! Think of the CHILDREN! How heartless can you be?
Has tearing the bill of rights to shreds been decreasing the number of terror attacks so far?
The data is too sparse to reach a conclusion. The number of attacks was near zero both before and after 9/11, and the operations you mentioned were not the only variable. We have better security, more public awareness, etc. Either way, terrorism isn't a significant risk, and our government should be diverting resources to finding solutions to far bigger risks, like obesity and dementia.
Having a populace that aren't sheep will solve this. But no, we couldn't have that, otherwise they'd know they were being screwed in all kinds of ways.
And yet, here we are, with our stupid Savannah ape brains, unable to discern a meaningful and present threat to our person from a threat that's unlikely to harm you or anyone you know even to the second or third degree ever.
It's not just people from Georgia, it's all over the south.
Will we be allowed to suggest it for the first orange president?
"BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.
But still something must be done.
Why?
The problem with that question is it leads politicians to the following:
1) Something must be done!
2) This is something! *
3) Let's do it!
* Where "something" usually has the (intended) consequences of spending more taxpayer money to increase some politician's or bureaucrats fiefdom, and the (unintended) consequences to the cure being far worse than the disease.
Here's what I love about the Russians, folks, they don't charge cleaning fees. They did my hotel laundering for free, they did my money laundering for free, they even financed my campaign. VERY SMART!
Quite the opposite.. he's trying to ensure that fascism DOESN'T come to America. ... by making it a surveillance state that would make the Geheime Staatspolizei (gestapo) or the later Stazi green with envy.
A surveillance state which, BTW, the next president will inherit in a week.
Why wasn't Obama impeached for spying on Americans?
Why wasn't Bush impeached for spying on Americans?
Why won't Trump be impeached for spying on Americans?
The most wrong thing to do is accept the loss of human rights to serve the insane psychopathic greed of corporations. Privacy is a right and people should have the expectation that their right to their privacy will be respected by law. It is the duty of citizens to ensure their rights are protected including their right to privacy. There is no doubt that criminal penalties need to be applied to privacy invasive and abuse corporations.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
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.
This sounds like a time bomb. With more people on the case it is increasingly difficult to vet them all making a fiasco like Snowden ever more likely.
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
Exactly. Treating terrorism like some great geopolitical threat is like a doctor saying he has to amputate your arm because you have a paper cut on your finger. I'm not saying we don't take measures to keep ourselves safe, but the insanity that terrorism creates among politicians and the general populace is completely out of proportion to the threat that it actually represents. Like the War on Drugs, the War on Terror seems to be more about creating the illusion of government action and keeping law enforcement agencies' budgets big and fat. You'd probably save more lives in a year doubling the number of speed traps on your average freeway than in all the anti-terror measures that have been put in place.
Treat terrorists like what they are, criminals. You don't have a fucking War on the Mafia, you have the FBI and other international, federal and state law enforcement agencies actively working to break them up. To my mind, the worst thing that the West has ever done is overestimate the threat of terrorism. It's given the terrorists what they want, an air of menace that far outstrips the actual threat. I wonder if there would even be an ISIS if the West hadn't spent so much energy making terrorism seem like the greatest threat against mankind.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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:
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.
I'm going to come out and say it. I am not concerned about Muslim terrorists. That's not to say that I or someone close to me being killed or injured by one. But then again, there's nothing to say that I don't walk out my front door tomorrow and get struck by a bus or tomorrow at lunch choking on a chicken wing, or that as we speak a tumor is growing in my prostrate. There are a near infinite number of ways to die, and I'll be blunt, a terrorist attack is very very very very very very very very very very low on that list.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Frankly, I'm amazed we've survived this long without more rights trampled.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
That would undoubtedly compromise intelligence gathering methods. Plus it would be only a matter of time before one of the recipients got hacked and all the data dumped.
Our brains, like probably all brains, are wired to recognize immediate threat. On that score we are very good at assessing risk; a dark alley may hold unspoken menace, an angry man in a crowd represents an obvious threat, and so forth. Where our wiring falls short is less immediate threats. That's how the media and politicians, either intentionally or inadvertently, can trick our brains into very piss poor risk assessment, and why the solution to bad risk assessment is an actual understanding of threat.
Want to talk to someone who can tell you the most likely ways you're going to die, don't talk to a cop, don't talk to a NSA employee or CIA agent, don't even talk to your doctor. Go talk to an insurance actuary. That is an entire profession based on actual statistical analysis of risk to determine which risks are actually more likely than others, which risks are certain, which risks are likely, and which risks are very small indeed.
Probably the greatest example of humans native inability to assess risk is child abuse. All the "run from stranger" programs out there are based on the false premise that the greatest threat of molestation of your child lies with strange men in parks, washrooms and outside schools. And of course this is fueled by the fact that, with a several hundred million people in North America, that there will always be a number of these kinds of attacks per year. But statistically, what your child has to worry about the most as far as sexual abuse goes isn't shifty eyed perverts outside their school, it's close family members and friends.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
What rights exactly did Obama trample? I believe they were thrown under the bus by Cheney/Bush long before Obama got anywhere close to the white house.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Treat terrorists like what they are, criminals.
If only our political leaders had had the courage to do that after the major attacks of recent years.
Statement from the President/Prime Minister: "This was a horrible crime, and our thoughts are with the victims and their families and friends today. We are confident that the police will find the perpetrators and they will be brought before the courts to face the consequence for what they have done. In addition, the security services will investigate whether lessons can be learned to reduce the risk of similar crimes in the future. However, this appears to have been an isolated incident, and we urge everyone to remain calm and to carry on with their daily lives as normal. Thank you."
End of discussion. End of free publicity for people trying to use violence to advance their political cause. Spend the rest of the money and attention and other valuable resources on more useful things instead of making everyone's life worse.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
He just needed to get out of office.
Obama made the most pro-transparency move of his office time. By greatly increasing access to secret information, the odds of us knowing the lies and crimes of the future administration are also increased. Let's hope for new troves.
LOL!
"Obama Promises, Including Whistleblower Protections, Disappear From Website"
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
It started in 2007, when junior Senator Obama voted to give retroactive immunity to the telecoms caught illegally handing over the data on Americans. Interestingly, this was one of the few times the joker didn't vote "present."
It went downhill from there: legalized data "collection" on all Americans, torture handovers, Arab Spring/ISIS financing, coverups (see Assange/Manning/Snowden persecution), etc.
His latest: expanded NSA power to hand over warantless data on Americans to other agencies.
This week the devil is trying to take away our right to live: 2500 army vehicles moved to Poland, special forces moved to Lithuania... The devil wants to go out with a nuclear bang, it seems.
Obama is the one who started targeting specific American citizens for drone strikes because they were maybe related to a terrorist. Trial? What's that.
And he helped increase all this spying which, as you might remember, is now going into Trump's hands.
Finally, he decides to sabotage Israel on his way out and does his best to start a war with Russia, because apparently it'd be a bad thing if we work with them to crush Isis? Frankly, I don't know what he was thinking with this and it's the most disappointed I've ever been in him since I first voted for the man.
Congress voted for it, and who controls congress? Now I'll grant you that Obama could at least symbolically have vetoed it, and should have, IMNSHO.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
That's the simplest scenario - which do you advocate? If it's A, then what happens if you do have insurance? If it's B, who pays if you are not insured and have no means to pay?
The cesspool just got a check and balance.