US Spy Chief Reverses Course, Will Not Say How Many Americans Caught in NSA Surveillance (zdnet.com)

Zack Whittaker, writing for ZDNet: US Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats has refused to say how many Americans have been caught up in the government's surveillance programs, reversing a confirmation pledge he made earlier this year. Coats said at a hearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee on the reauthorization of a key foreign surveillance law that it is "infeasible" to provide an estimate of how many Americans' communications have been collected by the National Security Agency. It's a key question that has been raised by senior lawmakers on several occasions of both the Obama and Trump administrations.

Comments

Easy answer

[fustakrakich]

All of them, and a shitload of people outside the border too.

Re: Easy answer

[Reverend Green]

A better question would be, is there *anyone* in the United States who has not been subject to surveillance. My guess is no.

Re:Easy answer

[Aighearach]

Not everybody even has a cell phone or internet access, so it is unlikely to be everybody.

Re: Easy answer

[Aighearach]

Off Grid Guy.

Many of the people in prison.

Amish people.

Deaf people who still only use the old TTY system.

A few of the homeless.

Re:Easy answer

[amiga3D]

Yes, you got it. That's why they can't stop anything. They collect everything thus when something blows up they can figure it all out. But they can't stop it because it's too much info to parse adequately.

Re: Easy answer

[Reverend Green]

I dunno about of grid guy. That kinda person is rare and interesting enough they might get some physical surveillance. If not an agent to check in on them from time to time, at least periodic drone flyoversâ.

The Amish are completely peaceful and harmless. But they do represent a virtuous traditional âculture that's quite nearly the polar opposite of degenerate financialists.

And they're land-rich. Really nice land. A whole lot of nice land. Land never touched by toxic pesticides and synthetic fertilizersâ.

I'm sure there must be at least a few filthy capitalists - with old boy network connections to the security state - salivating over that land. And plotting ways to disposess the gentle Amish who have proven themselves such good stewards of God's creation.

Re:Easy answer

[AHuxley]

Everyone within 4 hops of anyone in the USA detected with any international connection. A friend of a friend of a friend knows a person in the USA who networked outside the USA?

Re: Easy answer

[AHuxley]

Go back to the domestic original of some of the domestic collection in the USA.
Anti Vietnam war people had their photo taken and any and all phone, car details got collected.
Been in a location is all that is needed to start domestic collection. Once that car is found, phone numbers and friends of friends of friends start to be collected on.

Re: Easy answer

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure about that? - https://panopticlick.eff.org/
Then in addition to that. Do you login to any website from that computer?

Do you have a cellphone?
Then yes, you are being snooped upon.

Do you drive your own vehicle to and from work?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://www.schneier.com/blog/...

Do you take the subway/bus/bike to and from work?
https://www.schneier.com/blog/...
http://gizmodo.com/british-cop...

So if you combine this intelligence they could analyze the different data sources and over time probably match your face/licence-plate to your actual web-traffic. And it could all be automated.
Monitor over a time-period. Identify the traffic (login to a service or browser-fingerprinting or behaviour-fingerprinting). Identify when the traffic stops and who leaves the building after and with a year of monitoring you can exclude all the co-workers that left before or did not arrive before your web-traffic stopped.

Re:Easy answer

[ravenshrike]

Most likely he figured that there would be some easy way to identify how many Americans were caught in the dragnet. Then he got access and they told him that they had no way to identify how many Americans they regularly recorded even though that's one of the things they're supposed to avoid if possible. If that's the case then he was entirely truthful in his statement and the layperson should just assume the total is too damn many.

Re:Easy answer

[BlueStrat]

Yes, you got it. That's why they can't stop anything. They collect everything thus when something blows up they can figure it all out. But they can't stop it because it's too much info to parse adequately.

The only use the current design of the US electronic surveillance infrastructure is truly suited for is spying on the domestic population. It is a poor tool for anything else.

I find it tragically-hilarious to watch all these corrupt TLA officials and Congresscritters trying to dance around those facts while performing these Kabuki-theater "investigations" in an attempt to deflect public outrage.

Strat

Re:Easy answer

[PolygamousRanchKid]

All of them, and a shitload of people outside the border too.

As a US citizen, living outside of what used to be the country of | by | for the people . . . I'm guessing that I have already been snagged in the NSA | CIA | FBI | God-knows-who-elses "Mother of all Big Brother Apparatchik Systems". Former East German Secretion Police (Stasi) officers are easy to spot in a crowd these days. They are ones with faces green with envy, at what the US Secretion Services have created.

it is "infeasible" to provide an estimate of how many Americans' communications have been collected by the National Security Agency.

"Ah, Mr Buster Gonads, and his unfeasibly large testicles . . . I've been expecting you!" Here let me give you a quick start:

SELECT * FROM * WHERE CITIZEN IS-KINDA-SORTA-LIKE USA;

The rest is left as an exercise for the student.

Oh, and being that the spooks are wasting plenty of time reading this post from me, I'd like to take this quick opportunity to cordially invite them to kiss my hairy ass. And, of course, I would encourage the 300+ million US citizens at home, who are also being spied on, to tell the spooks the same thing.

Re: Easy answer

[Anonymous Coward]

Lancaster county resident here. I love the Amish, but if you think their land has never been touched by chemical feritilizers/pesticides, you are living in a dream world. The only Amish farming organically are those who have done the math and determined they can increase their profit margins that way.
Furthermore, the "capitalist" greedily eyeing their land is just as likely to be another Amish person as it is an English.
The many varying sects of Amish have complex beliefs and social structures that encourage them to reject certain aspects of modern society. But one they certainly do not reject is the drive to wring as much profit from the resources they have as possible, and not always in ways that one would find to be ethical or somehow in harmony with nature.
Google "Amish puppy mills" sometime, or "Amish OSHA abuses."
Long story short, underneath the old timey clothes and inside the covered buggies are more or less regular people with impulses just as craven as anyone else's.

Re: Easy answer

[Antique Geekmeister]

I'm afraid that the easy answer is "all of them". Avoiding the kind of ubiquitous monitoring done on the cores of our telecom, email, fiscal, manufacturing, sales, and medical systems by the NSA is very difficult.

People in prison could be much more interesting to monitor, because they've already committed crimes and have limited, often easily monitored contact with the outside world. Many are immigrants, legal or illegal, and have family or business contacts in their native countries. They're also an infamous source of cult members and recruits to dangerous religious or political movements.

The Amish use phones and email for business, and handle credit cards or bank cards for business. They apparently are the largest owner of puppy mills, and that _does_ require paperwork for shipping, phones, and email in the modern world. They don't use these technologies _casually_, so they have a much smaller electronic footprint than many US citizens, but they certainly have one.

Deaf people using TTY are a very small group, and the TTY on the remote end is often built into a computer application. The TTY signal going over the telephone has been digitized by the phone company at some location in almost *all* modern phone lines, both local and long distance: It's content is recorded by organizations like the NSA simply to avoid people using it as a secret communications channel.

A small number of the homeless can be close to living off the grid. But as soon as they're staying in a shelter, or arrested, they have an electronic footprint again.

Re: Easy answer

[epine]

I dunno about of grid guy. That kinda person is rare and interesting enough they might get some physical surveillance.

I think people are in part attracted to this subject for all the opportunities it provides to masturbate over the presumptively infinite dark budget—flip side of one mad guy conducting Symphony of a Thousand on secret volcanic island.

Read my lips: mass surveillance.

As in Henry Ford. As in McDonald's. That's the whole point of our present-day military-industrial economic order.

I used to ask myself, why are all the crazy people trying to make bioreactors to generate ethanol, or some other carbon-based fuel, when they could be bio-reacting a nitrogen-based fertilizer instead (the quantities involved are more realistic). But perhaps the NSA doesn't want random people halfway off the grid to possess this particular biotechnology.

So perhaps in this case they might actually eff themselves to roll a damn-expensive invisible, black truck to surveil some marginal crank with a gene printer apparently subsisting on juniper berries in a long lost valley.

You know what?

I'm barely biting on my own rabid edge case.

The NSA is simply too damn cheap. The most they're gonna roll is a custom regex.

Re:Easy answer

[AHuxley]

AC NSA Admits Searching "3 Hops" From Suspects (July 19, 2013)
https://yro.slashdot.org/story...

Re: Easy answer

[Toad-san]

Amish peaceful? Maybe. Harmless? Hardly.

http://amishamerica.com/do-ami...

I suggest that thou doth not screw with the Amish. They will turn the other cheek only so often, methinks.

Re: Easy answer

[Aighearach]

Amish who use cell phones, yeah, they might be monitored. Usually though the Amish keep a land line in the barn for needed business. Land lines are not monitored in bulk.

Prisoners are obviously heavily monitored, but why would the NSA be doing it? NSA isn't a law enforcement agency, and very few prisoners would be of interest to them. Furthermore, most of the prisoners only have access to landline payphones.

Deaf people using TTY are a group with more than zero members. Here you just wave your hands and manufacture a new type of monitoring that is unlikely to exist, and certainly not known to you.

Staying in a shelter does not create an electronic footprint, and creating an electronic footprint is not the same thing as being tracked by the NSA, or by any sort of feds. Most shelters don't even have electronic records at that level, they have 3x5 cards that get date stamped in ink, and the daily totals of people served are then input into a computer. Periodic aggregates will be reported to various places, especially to donors, but they're sure not going to publish a list on the wall of the people who stayed there.

You seem to have a lot of trouble finding the line between "zero" and "not zero." But it is actually narrow and clear.

Re: Easy answer

[Aighearach]

I'm not saying all Off Grid Guys, I'm just saying that at least one of them is actually living it.

If you think a drone flying over you means you're being monitored by the NSA, you might as well just crawl back into the tinfoil coffin, it still isn't safe to come out.

Re: Easy answer

[Antique Geekmeister]

> Amish who use cell phones, yeah, they might be monitored. Usually though the Amish keep a land line in the barn for needed business. Land lines are not monitored in bulk.

Bank transactions are monitored. So are landlines, in bulk, at the switching centers. The room 641A fiber optic taps at the AT&T offices were not targeted at cell phones, those were on one of the cores of the US telecommunications systems. It's unreasonable to assume that such taps no longer exist, and the Wikileaks documents are clear that telephone tapping is wholesale across the entire telecom system.

> Deaf people using TTY are a group with more than zero members. Here you just wave your hands and manufacture a new type of monitoring that is unlikely to exist, and certainly not known to you.

I'm not ignoring it: the remote end of TTY services for most companies or homes are no longer mechanical teleprinters, they are multi-function computers. TTY traffic is not encrypted on the telephone backbones or in the switching stations. Unless you've gone to the now extraordinary work to get a real POTS line all the way to the local switchin gcenter, It's already been digitized throughout most of its passage for ease of transmission at the switching centers, and it is _simpler_ to record the communications in bulk than it is for voice communicaitons. No interpretation is needed, it's already plain text.

> Staying in a shelter does not create an electronic footprint,

I'm afraid it does. Most try to collect names, and mail addresses for families to reach out to them for donations. Medical needs for the many ill homeless requires treatment and prescriptions. Today, even paper records wind up recorded electronically and I've some reason to suspect monitored wholesale, especially for immigration or crime issues. It's not as _large_ of an electronic footprint as normal working citizens, but it's not zero.

I suspect I've worked with the extremely poor, including the homeless, more recently than you. It's very difficult for them not to have _some_ monitorable footprint, whether medical or in struggling for some kind of handout. They do "slip through the cracks" of services that are supposed to help them, but that's much different than their not having a detectable or noticeable trace.

> You seem to have a lot of trouble finding the line between "zero" and "not zero." But it is actually narrow and clear.

I agree with you that it is usually quite clear. In this case, the difference between being "low electronic footprint" and "monitored as a matter of course" is a distinct matter. The threshold of "not being visible to bulk monitoring", is lowered by the desire to specifically monitor those people who are close to that line, they're often of more interest for political or criminal reason. Coupled with local government monitoring for local crime, which is available to NSA monitoring, and coupled with both peaceful and criminal political activity fostered among the very poor in every nation, and I suggest that threshold of invisibility or immunity to NSA bulk monitoring is much lower than you seem to think.

Re: Easy answer

[Aighearach]

That's way more tinfoil than I'm gonna install, that's for sure.

You might want to check the conduit where you bring your internet link through the cage, and make sure there are no gaps.

I do want to say though that if you go and volunteer at a local shelter you'll be able to verify what I said. There are generally not individual electronic records even created. And they wouldn't, because some of the people they're helping have even more tinfoil than you.

Re: Easy answer

[Antique Geekmeister]

I've been on the board of several in the last 20 years. Phone records are automatically monitorable by the NSA's ubiquitous monitoring, though tying that back to an individual can be difficult. It still counts as monitoring even if it's unidentified. Medical records are a _nightmare_, especially for those needing opiates of any sort, anything that requires syringes such as insulin, and prescripton controlled psychoactive medications which may be hoarded or resold such as Ritalin and Adderall. And I've helped with repairing phone systems in several such institutions.

If you'd care to tighten the category to homeless who can't remember or refuse to provide their names and family contacts, and who have no critical medical requirements, then they are less monitored or monitorable. But it's part of the role of the staff and of social workers who work with the homeless to get contact information to get them in touch with family and with services who can help them, to help establish contacts with the parts of the "social network" that can help them. It can be a very difficult balancing act to protect the privacy of those who are fleeing a very real danger or simply fears, and to get them the resources they need. But if an institution is saying "there will be nothing other than a paper trace, your identity will forever be secret", it's much like the privacy of the HIPAA policies. It's usually nowhere near as secured, and _cannot_ be as secured, as promised.

Re: Easy answer

[Aighearach]

Always wrap the board in tinfoil, it doesn't matter how long you age the wood.

Re: Impeachment

[Reverend Green]

Dude - it's too late to impeach Obama - he's already out.

Re:Impeachment

[Anonymous Coward]

Outsider looking in, ever consider that the following can all be true?

1) The russians worked their asses off to see trump elected

2) the trump campaign wasn't actively colluding with them

3) trumps actions given the situation are reason enough to despise him and potentially look to impeachment?

just saying, at this point the actuality of collusion isn't necessary to prove the fellow unfit to be president.

Surprised. Not.

[Anonymous Coward]

In related news, Webster's dictionary has just updated its entry for "Transparency" to, "see Opaque..."

Answer

[markdavis]

>"it is "infeasible" to provide an estimate of how many Americans' communications have been collected"

Because there has been, is, and will still be no real accountability, so why should they expend the time/money/effort to track what they track or make methods to do so? And even if they did, would you believe it? I won't. Who will verify it?

Re:Answer

[gl4ss]

it's infeasible because they're trying to collect everything from everyone.

but sometimes they get twice from the same guy, so they can't say how many americans they are targeting - because they tried to do the number at it came up as 100 million more than there are americans. it is infeasible to come up with an exact number which is why he was asked for an estimate but he refuses to even take a guess(estimate).

like, come on, everyone knows it's bullshit. he refuses to give even a ballpark estimate because that estimate would be "everyone".

like .. surely he could be asked... "do you think it is under 1 million?" "do you think it is more than 50 million?". followed by.. "just who the fuck do you survey, everyone??".

Re:Answer

[acrimonious howard]

guess(estimate).

Today's English lesson: just shorten it to "guestimate", comrade.

"just who the fuck do you survey, everyone??"

Yes, the evil American intelligence is the ultimate evil, always ... surveying. Mother russia is a white snowflake princess. The free press in Russia would definitely report any government abuses.

Re: Answer

[Reverend Green]

Nice non sequitur!

I don't know of anyone who thinks the Russian FSB & friends are somehow better than the American alphabet soup agencies. But pretty much everyone thinks the American agencies should not be conducting mass surveillance on their own people.

Re: Answer

[acrimonious howard]

If you thought it was non sequitur, then you missed gl4ss's gillion posts attacking America and defending Russian positions (so now you know someone).

Re:Answer

[rtb61]

That is pretty much accurate. US intelligence service over the pst three decades pretty much as evil as it fucking gets, mass murdering sick freaks in love with killing or have you not been paying attention. Pretty much do not give one fuck who they kill or torture and they are the global winners, committing more heinous crimes than the rest of the world combined. Pretty good marketing and PR while it lasted but that time is over. I do not think the English language has sufficient abusive curse words to cover the depraved nature of US corruption agencies, just the sickest organisations on the planet.

Re:Impeachment

[fred911]

"Remember - only Russia posts your private business on the internet. "

That's correct. Here in the USA we use unwarranted surveillance only to get sufficient enough information necessary to do a parallel construction of legal evidence to legally convict those we don't like. That way they can't say we violated their civil rights. Heck, it's easier than a FISA warrant.

Re:genie is out of the bottle

[93 Escort Wagon]

The only person safe from all this is someone who is completely off the grid and living in a cave somewhere.

Except my cave is wired with 10G Ethernet.

What he really meant

[93 Escort Wagon]

He really was planning to give them the number; but he ran out of zeroes.

Re:Impeachment

[gl4ss]

4) trump campaign staff was lobbying russians because they're lobbyists and don't know what should have been done or what even matters or if even talking with the russians made any sense at all - and his aides don't understand that russia doesn't matter all that much - and his aides were also trying to push some personal businesses with their newfound high level connections.

----

like, I don't think they understood what would constitute as a treason when trying to make pre-deals with a foreign government. I don't think they expected putin to help with them fake news etc - besides the fucking trump campaign believed the fake news themselves. it's just amateurs making amateur mistakes at not understanding the game or the rules of the game.

Re:Impeachment

[Anonymous Coward]

Just FYI: The last time a president was impeached for no good reason other than that the opposing party really, REALLY hated his guts, he came out of it acquitted and with a 70% approval rating. I'm sure it's all on youtube somewhere - or at least the cspan website - if you'd like to go remind yourself what a sad, pointless shitshow that whole process was.

Keep it up though. Blowing your impeachment wad on some trivial bullshit like this essentially gives Trump an automatic pass for any small-to-medium-sized scandal for the rest of his term. Not to mention it's just plain hilarious to watch you get your hopes up over and over and over. I would've thought after "His ceiling is 25%" or "The delegates will all defect to Rubio" or "Hillary has a 99% chance to win" or "The recounts will flip Wisconsin and Pennsylvania" or "40 Trump electors will switch to Hillary" or... you'd have learned, but hope springs eternal I guess.

Number caught up in surveillance

[SeriousTube]

Let me guess. Somewhere between 200 - 300 million.

meh

[superwiz]

I think the key argument is that until unmasking the person at the other end of the conversation, they cannot know who it is. And without knowing who it is, they don't know if they should count them as an American participating in the conversation. But he wasn't asked for anything even close to an exact number. He could have provided an order of magnitude estimate based solely on statistical evidence. They know how phone calls occur in any one geographic area. They know how many they capture in that area. And from the US census they know what percentage of the residents of the area are US citizens. This is enough to give a ball park estimate of how many citizens were recorded without being unmasked.

IE: All of them

[grasshoppa]

It's infeasible not because it's technically challenging or anything. No, it's because they don't want to deal with the PR fall out.

Not that anyone would care.

Re:Have they no system for self-auditing?

[AHuxley]

The UK considered the legal question of domestic calls in the 1960's when collecting on the Intelsat commercial satellites. It was cheaper just to collect everything and then sort for numbers later.
The ability to select calls, phone numbers and new calls to phone numbers been watched did not work.
The duplication of an entire network was cheaper.
The legality of US domestic collection can be found in the 1930-70's .
Self-auditing is done only to ensure every call is been collected domestically and that the contractor is really collecting everything as expected.
Self-auditing also has security issues in the US gov. Why is everything interesting kept in plain text on open networks in the USA?
So other agencies can search results without creating errors in some auditing systems. Sorting and indexing can keep pace with data searches by all other mil/gov staff.
Say someone with clearance was searching for the build up of a Tet Offensive and could warn the US mil of such an event due to all the information they could search?
Having such work slowed down by constant self-auditing would make US "collect it all" global material less useful as all the staff would be filling in requests to search data. Or telling other staff what they search for and why.
The US liked to allow its cleared staff to search and write reports given clearances based on a feeling of trust and initiative.
Searching bait projects or a persons own name was always tracked.
Any consideration of auditing was done decades ago.

Re:Impeachment

[gl4ss]

look man it's not just that.

it gives them possibilities and power to play on the stock market for example, gaining huge financial benefits. it gives them the possibilities to spy on those who are supposed to keep them in limit, giving them the ability to dodge charges. it gives them the ability to blackmail those in power.

look, you only need to look at Russia if you want to see the typical bad kind of end result from giving some guys the rights to spy on everyone - those guys end up with all the possible power in the country.

also to note is that a bunch of guys given such power can be doing it forever while thinking that they are the "good" guys. I got no doubt that Putin thinks he is doing what is good for the country(but also that Putin can no longer step down too, because of the methods used to get power).

Easy question to answer

[stooo]

>> how many Americans have been caught up in the government's surveillance programs
The answer is 320 million.

Re:Easy question to answer

[Joce640k]

It will be slightly less. Toddlers aren't worth spying on.

Re:Easy question to answer

[arth1]

It will be slightly less. Toddlers aren't worth spying on.

It would take effort to exclude them. Internet enabled dolls, baby monitors, cameras, insurance company and pediatrician online usage, diaper purchases... it's all data that ends up being collected unless excluded.
Which presumably is "infeasible".

Re:Easy question to answer

[OldIsCool]

>= 321.4 Million

Re:Easy question to answer

[thsths]

That would be my guess, too. So it is "infeasible" to reveal the number without upsetting the population.

"infeasible" to provide an estimate of how many..

[The123king]

A round-about away of saying "All of them"

Re:Have they no system for self-auditing?

[The123king]

You don't need data scientists when the answers is "everyone"

The explanation was entirely reasonable

[DrXym]

I listened to the hearings and the explanation given was entirely reasonable. To wit, if you're recording a communication between two foreign suspects and they mention someone else's name(s), then how do you know if that person is an American citizen or not? It might be simple to check or it might require time consuming and highly intrusive checks to find out. Is the John Smith they mentioned a US citizen? How many John Smith's personal records are you going to trawl through to find a guy who isn't even central to your investigation. What about suspect's schoolfriend Abu who is mentioned to be married now? Are you going to bust into some Pakistani school to find out if any Abu's have emigrated to America and subsequently married? Even though again it's not relevant to the investigation.

If you can't know in the majority of cases if a person is a US citizen without a disproportionate and arguably even more intrusive investigation, and in some cases never know, then what's the purpose of the question again?

It would be better to ask how many names are immediately identifiable as US citizens or whose name have accidentally been exposed contrary to the rules governing FISA.

Re:The explanation was entirely reasonable

[drinkypoo]

The feds intercept and scan literally every email and phone call which goes through an exchange (of the appropriate sort) of any size. So no, it's not reasonable, and the answer is "everyone, and anyone we haven't got yet, we will".

Re:The explanation was entirely reasonable

[arth1]

I listened to the hearings and the explanation given was entirely reasonable. To wit, if you're recording a communication between two foreign suspects and they mention someone else's name(s), then how do you know if that person is an American citizen or not?

You don't have to know. Mark anyone you don't know the nationality of as unknown. That will give a minimum/maximum range, which would be quite informative as an answer.

"Infeasible".... If the NSA cannot even gauge what they themselves are doing, perhaps they should not have a mandate to do it.

Re:Impeachment

[willy_me]

How about something more likely.

1) Russia scored when hacking. Part luck and part hard work.

2) Wanting to get the most out of their hack, the Russians dangle knowledge of the hack in front of the Trump team. "Scratch my back and I'll scratch yours."

3) The Trump team jumps on the opportunity. Notice how Trump pushed through a policy for the Republican party that no weapons should be given to Ukraine? That was back scratching.

4) Release of the Hillary emails was perfectly timed and Trump gets elected.

5) Since then, the Trump / Russia relationship has soured. But Putin is still able to remind Trump that he has proof of Trump lying. Remember the White House visit just a couple of days after Comey was fired? That looks bad and Trump knows it. But since it was requested by Putin, he has to follow through. This is Putin yanking Trumps chain - a subtle reminder of the damage Putin could inflict upon Trump.

Nationalities are useless online

[Kiuas]

The problem with all online mass surveillance schemes is that data has no nationality. From the standpoint of those doing the surveillance they're interested in the origin of the data and its destination. A big deal is made out of this in PR. The same hassle is currently going on here in Finland with the government discussing granting additional rights to the authorities for a wider range of powers to collect information to counter terrorism and Russian cyberactivity, and the respective authorities have kept hammering how they'd only use it to target data coming in from abroad. However there's really no such thing as data 'inside' and 'outside' Finland. Most of the traffic that people send to each other within the country will at some point in the chain cross the border and circulate outside the country before it comes back, and upon re-entry it'd be susceptible to collection.

It's my understanding based on the Snowden leaks that the US does pretty much the same thing by having the Brits to gather data of US nationals that crosses the border and then they get the data from them, allowing them to claim that they never themselves technically 'collected' any of it.

There's no such thing as 'targeted' mass surveillance or 'mass surveillance only for foreigners' because the net is by its very design a borderless environment. Hell, even non tech-savy people these days understand this principle as the use of VPNs to circumvent geoblocking is widespread. so why would anyone still seriously think that agencies and authorities would respect non-existent borders in cyberspace?

Leon, the professional

[houghi]

If there was evera time to use that GIF from Leon, the professional, it is now. You know the one: http://i.imgur.com/XokkJLp.gif

Re: Impeachment

[Entrope]

Legally, the crime of robbery has three elements: the robber takes money or goods from the victim, in the victim's presence, by force or intimidation. Picking up a lost $20 off the sidewalk lacks two of those elements.

So who's not very good at this?

Yeah, right

[moeinvt]

It might be infeasible to get an "estimate" like 2,761,400, but how about he gives us an estimate rounded the nearest say, hundred million? Is it 200 million U.S. citizens or 300 million?

"potentially violate the privacy of those whose data had been collected by verifying their identities."

The U.S. Constitution prohibits "unreasonable searches or SEIZURES"(emphasis added). If they have "collected" the data, isn't that just another way of saying they have "seized" the data?

Re:Hey, Obama will end warrantless wiretaps you kn

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Just like he promised to close Gitmo

Subject to Acts of God and Congress (TM).

Re:Impeachment

[Anonymous Coward]

You have to give someone the opportunity to claim it as lost property for a while before the police will let you keep it.

You mean before they decide to keep it via civil forfeiture. While they inform you of this, they'll probably rummage through your pockets, too.

Re:Impeachment

[Anonymous Coward]

Your definition of "fit to be president" undoubtedly will be different than at least 50% of the the population of the United States. "Fit to be President" is a bullshit meme used by low IQ thinkers in order to try and create the perception that somehow Trump was a mistake. Let me put it to you directly. Trump is not a mistake. Democracy worked perfectly as INTENDED by the founding fathers of the nation. You may not like the result, but there is ZERO reason to even begin to dream about impeachment of Trump. Instead, look at the documented and proven crimes against humanity of Hillary Clinton. I'm not "pro-Trump" but I am sick and tired hearing this absolute nonsense as though Trump did something worthy of impeachment when there is absolutely no evidence and while we have a mountain of PROOF against Clinton. Please, be intellectually honest.

It's difficult to be precise

[Maritz]

Because people are being born, and dying, every minute.

At least you have judicial oversight, though. Look at the UK. 40 agencies dipping into your web browsing any time they like, for any reason. China would be well jelly.

"Daily Reminder"

[kelanos]

We are all meant to be cattle, and if SOME of us don't start proving that we aren't RIGHT NOW, that is the fate in store for ALL of us.

Good followup questions

[dcollins117]

"Infeasible", as in you just don't know? Do you know anything about this new job you've gotten? I see you don't know the scope of it, do you even have any idea what the job entails?

If I was new at a job, I'd work a little harder to demonstrate that I'm competent to do it.

Re:Good followup questions

[Alascom]

>> "Infeasible", as in you just don't know?

In order to determine how many Americans, they would have to "unmask" every individual on every interception, which means identifying everyone - American and non-American. Otherwise, how can you know how many of the intercepted individuals were Americans? Intelligence agencies are forbidden by law from unmasking non-targets of 702 intercepts unless absolutely necessary in order to not violate Fourth Amendment protections.

In seems insane to think we can wiretap an American (well, technically someone who is talking to one or more Americans) but as long as we don't identify the American it isn't spying on them. But, from the legal perspective facing an intelligence Director, I can understand his position.

This whole 702 unmasking feels an awful lot like "fishing expeditions" which, in other situations, are illegal.

Re:genie is out of the bottle

[green1]

"Rachel from cardholder services" is only a threat to normal people, the elite don't have to deal with "her", so why would they expend resources going after the scam?

That said, the bigger issue is that they collect so much data, that there is no possible way to actually filter it in any meaningful way and bring out any useful data. This is why every time there's an attack of some form the authorities can almost instantly know everything about the attacker, but can't do anything to prevent it in the first place. It's easy to search your database for a known person and get everything about them, it's impossible to search the database for "criminal/terrorist intent with ability and likelihood of carrying it through"

It would be far more worthwhile to save billions of dollars on mass surveillance and spend that same money on old school investigators who can actually figure out what's going on, follow leads, and prevent things ahead of time.

All of them

[WillAffleckUW]

look, we never admit we use all of the data sources.

Traffic cams, ATMs, bus videos, your car itself, any public area video, all internal "secure" video (we have access), your own gaming consoles, your own TVs, even your fridge.

We don't use your toaster or your microwave. Unless you got a model with a built in TV or moderate level radio.

So, the short answer is every single American. Even the ones who think they are off the grid and not being surveilled.

Re: "infeasible" to provide an estimate of how man

[painandgreed]

A round-about away of saying "All of them"

I remember when Bush was still in office and the beginnings of this were going around. People here on /. were familiar with the workings of the telcom industry and saying, "the only way they could be scanning suspected terrorists communications, is if they were scanning everybodies." It was just how the system was set up at the time. There were also reports of various rooms in the telcom nodes that the usual IT didn't deal with. This was all pretty much illegal because although they could get any warrant they wanted for anybody, even after the fact, there was no way the courts would ok a warrant for everybody, which is what they would need, in order to do what they were doing. Hense all the FISA stuff. Under Obama, he did not stop it and it became more widely known and admitted. They may have cut back, but only because the tech now exists for them to narrow their scans which puts less work load on them and their equipment.

Did you hear Comey?

[Anonymous Coward]

Comey stated the FBI NEVER, let me repeat that NEVER, had access to the hacked DNC servers. In fact the ONLY person that looked at hacking the servers, CrowdStrike, has been caught lying about Russia hacking Ukraine recently. That's right, the ONLY existing evidence is from a guy who has been known to lie about Russian hacking.

The Intercept publishing of NSA documents showed a phishing email. That isn't evidence, I could do that in an afternoon.

There appears to be ZERO actual evidence of Russian hacking that is credible. We could have had this known back in November, but I guess Comey was working for the DNC. You have been fooled by a liar. You have been told. You keep repeating it and YOU become the liar.

Re:genie is out of the bottle

[Nethead]

10GB wire? You mean those 3m SFP copper cables? Switches every 10 feet?

Just yanking your chain old 93.

Re: All 12 in London "attack" released without cha

[Brockmire]

There was no unnecessary p.s. at the end, so not apk.