NSA EXec: NSA illegally sping on Americans

[VMI77]

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011 ... ntPage=all

Excerpt:

Binney, for his part, believes that the agency now stores copies of all e-mails transmitted in America, in case the government wants to retrieve the details later. In the past few years, the N.S.A. has built enormous electronic-storage facilities in Texas and Utah. Binney says that an N.S.A. e-mail database can be searched with “dictionary selection,” in the manner of Google. After 9/11, he says, “General Hayden reassured everyone that the N.S.A. didn’t put out dragnets, and that was true. It had no need—it was getting every fish in the sea.”

Binney considers himself a conservative, and, as an opponent of big government, he worries that the N.S.A.’s data-mining program is so extensive that it could help “create an Orwellian state.” Whereas wiretap surveillance requires trained human operators, data mining is automated, meaning that the entire country can be watched. Conceivably, U.S. officials could “monitor the Tea Party, or reporters, whatever group or organization you want to target,” he says. “It’s exactly what the Founding Fathers never wanted.”

[sugar land dave]

For past history research, you can Google Echelon and Carnivore.

[Beiruty]

Is that a secret? Move pointer on and hit delete

[sjfcontrol]

Is that a secret? Move pointer on and hit delete

Not any more!

[VMI77]

Is that a secret? Move pointer on and hit delete

It is what it is.....the article is somewhat careful or muted in its claims. It makes the following reference to Mark Klein but doesn't mention that in his Federal Court testimony he said the NSA is recording the complete content of everything passing these switching centers: emails, streaming audio, streaming video, internet transactions, chats, video conferencing, downloads, uploads, browser searches, and postings like this one (and that means billions and trillions of infractions, not "hundreds of thousands").

In March, 2006, Mark Klein, a retired A.T. & T. employee, gave a sworn statement to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which was filing a lawsuit against the company, describing a secret room in San Francisco where powerful Narus computers appeared to be sorting and copying all of the telecom’s Internet traffic—both foreign and domestic. A high-capacity fibre-optic cable seemed to be forwarding this data to a centralized location, which, Klein surmised, was N.S.A. headquarters. Soon, USA Today reported that A.T. & T., Verizon, and BellSouth had secretly opened their electronic records to the government, in violation of communications laws. Legal experts said that each instance of spying without a warrant was a serious crime, and that there appeared to be hundreds of thousands of infractions.

[Middle Age Russ]

Yet another form of ELINT. Data mining is used to pull out communiques (whether email or radio) for further analysis based on certain key words or phrases being present.

The troubling aspect is domestic spying on the populace. Who knows what specific words or phrases will make your communications subject to further scrutiny. There should be a law... Oh, wait. There already is but it is being conveniently ignored by an overstepping bureaucracy.

[VMI77]

Yet another form of ELINT. Data mining is used to pull out communiques (whether email or radio) for further analysis based on certain key words or phrases being present.

The troubling aspect is domestic spying on the populace. Who knows what specific words or phrases will make your communications subject to further scrutiny. There should be a law... Oh, wait. There already is but it is being conveniently ignored by an overstepping bureaucracy.

It would be bad enough if they were just capturing traffic that produced hits, but they're storing everything and can conduct backwards looking searches on anything you've done over the internet since the program started. For instance, with the right software, they could collect all your posts, emails, and transactions related to firearms, and construct a pretty good picture of what guns you own --among other things.

[sjfcontrol]

Is it actually possible to store the entire internet traffic worldwide realtime on an ongoing basis? They can't even keep track of what I send to the IRS!

[VMI77]

Is it actually possible to store the entire internet traffic worldwide realtime on an ongoing basis? They can't even keep track of what I send to the IRS!

I don't know, they're building two new 1 MILLION square foot data storage centers at about $1.5 billion each: http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/featu ... sdropping/

The Utah facility is supposed to be storing yottabytes: http://www.crunchgear.com/2009/11/01/ns ... epository/

This article says:

And what is a yottabyte? I’m glad you asked.

There are a thousand gigabytes in a terabyte, a thousand terabytes in a petabyte, a thousand petabytes in an exabyte, a thousand exabytes in a zettabyte, and a thousand zettabytes in a yottabyte. In other words, a yottabyte is 1,000,000,000,000,000GB. Are you paranoid yet?


But for perspective, this article, if correct, makes me think the answer is yes, they can: http://www.pclaunches.com/industry_buzz ... tabyte.php

From the article:

Heard of Gigabytes, Terabytes, and even Petabytes. But wondering what the hell's a Yottabyte? Well, according to Wikipedia, a yottabyte is a unit of information or computer storage equal to one septillion (one long scale quadrillion or 10) bytes (one quadrillion gigabytes). And this is the capacity marker NSA is expecting to reach once its datacenter for storing surveillance data is up in the Utah desert.

As of 2009, no computer has yet achieved one yottabyte of storage. In fact, the combined space of all the computer hard drives in the world does not amount to even one zettabyte.

[pcgizzmo]

The way I've read this works is yes, they collect the data. It's our data. They are searching for certain phrases or words. Once they get a hit someone determines if they have reasonable cause to look at the full message or full data to determine if it's a valid threat. It works the same way as being pulled over or entry into a home.

If they have enough reason to believe based on the phrases or words contained in the data to look then then they believe legally they have authority. Notice I said "They believe" They don't even know who's data it is until it's fully looked into which is how they can do this w/out supposedly breaking any or our rights.

One could argue that they have no right to even hold the data since it was not destined for them. There is also privilege issues between attorneys and Dr's.

[sjfcontrol]

This whole subject keeps reminding me of the computers in "The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy".
I expect somebody to discover that, Yes, they can store and search all that data, but to complete a single data search will take 10,000 centuries to complete, by which time they'll be out of storage space, and will have to create a new computer system to handle it all. Ultimately, the answer will be "42".

[VMI77]

The way I've read this works is yes, they collect the data. It's our data. They are searching for certain phrases or words. Once they get a hit someone determines if they have reasonable cause to look at the full message or full data to determine if it's a valid threat. It works the same way as being pulled over or entry into a home.

If they have enough reason to believe based on the phrases or words contained in the data to look then then they believe legally they have authority. Notice I said "They believe" They don't even know who's data it is until it's fully looked into which is how they can do this w/out supposedly breaking any or our rights.

One could argue that they have no right to even hold the data since it was not destined for them. There is also privilege issues between attorneys and Dr's.

Let's assume our government is at this moment pure goodness and light and doesn't ever break the law or do anything wrong: then right at this moment it's not a problem this data is being kept. But since we can't guarantee this will always be true, and in fact, several thousand years of history tells us it is highly unlikely to remain true, then the collection and retention of all this data is extremely dangerous to our life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.

[hirundo82]

One could argue that they have no right to even hold the data since it was not destined for them. There is also privilege issues between attorneys and Dr's.

The NSA has never been particularly concerned with legality. They never expect any of what they're monitoring to go to court, so why worry about admissibility?