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Why Should Voters Pay For Useless NSA Databases?
Glenn Greenwald has a scoop for the Guardian. Well – sort of a scroop:
NSA collecting phone records of millions of Verizon customers daily:
The National Security Agency is currently collecting the telephone records of millions of US customers of Verizon, one of America's largest telecoms providers, under a top secret court order issued in April.
The order, a copy of which has been obtained by the Guardian, requires Verizon on an "ongoing, daily basis" to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems, both within the US and between the US and other countries.
The Guardian has a copy of the current secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (Fisa) order. It was issued on April 25 and gives the government unlimited authority to obtain data from Verizon for a three-month period ending on July 19.
Greenwald's scoop is in getting his hands on the court order. It is likely that the U.S. government will now open a case against the leaker of that order as well as against Greenwald himself. (Popcorn please.)
But the larger issue was already well known. The National Security Agency is collecting all telephone meta-data in the U.S. since at least 2006:
The National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth, people with direct knowledge of the arrangement told USA TODAY.
After the issue became public the telecoms demanded immunity and congress arranged for that. Congress also instituted a process that creates some formal legality for the massive data collection. While that mechanism is in itself secret we can reasonably assume that the FISA court will, every three month, issue court orders to all telecommunication companies and demand all the meta-data for all calls. It will likely have a similar process for individual internet access. Additional commercial data sources will enable the government to pinpoint each call and internet access back to individuals.
The purpose for such a massive data collection is somewhat dubious. The official reasoning is "terrorism":
A senior administration official said: "Information of the sort described in the Guardian article has been a critical tool in protecting the nation from terrorist threats to the United States, as it allows counter-terrorism personnel to discover whether known or suspected terrorists have been in contact with other persons who may be engaged in terrorist activities, particularly people located inside the United States.
That may be a theoretical purpose but how is that supposed to justify such massive preemptive data collection? The government could reasonably demand that telecommunication providers store individual call records for some three month. Many already do so for billing purposes. The government could then, should it need to in a specific case, request through a judge the relevant past connection data for a specific person. That mechanism would fulfill the purported need of the above "senior administration official".
But that seems not to be what the government wants. It wants to collect all data and it wants to process all that data. But for what purpose? After at least seven years and likely billions spend on the program one really wonders what this is about. Only two or three cases of successful terrorism have occurred in those years. Many other case went to court but all of those were of some dimwits entrapped by the FBI or caught otherwise. There is not one case I am aware of that can somehow be connected to the NSA's massive data hunt.
If there is no such case, or even if there were a few, why continue this unnecessary massive waste of federal resources? There is zero to little benefit from this project while it sucks up an enormous amount of tax payer money. Why should anyone pay for that? That is the question voters should ask their representatives.
@12&13, Concur, it is part of the parcel, the security industry is growth, in fact the industry is gigantic; so are ‘leads’. Decades ago you could buy Names and addresses, then it advanced to email addresses, now credit details, keywords with frequency (Audio and electronic). Just search Google for ‘Something’ (You can Buy) then in every page you visit an advert appears relating to that one time brief search. I keep on getting edible printers this week as my wife asked me a technical question relating to the print head. The month before ‘metal detectors’. Such systems also profile you; so last month I like Cake and lost something while baking I guess. However, if you eavesdrop, tap, you are liable, and have committed a number of crimes, even federal, and if you use evidence that is audio, strangely it’s rarely admissible in a court of Law. It seems they have tweaked the Laws over decades and have likewise been eavesdropping as well as ‘Selling’ data/content while mitigating it as a crime.
The units that monitor are overloaded, more so within cyberspace, the keywords range from 5000, and up in every language possible. To cripple (Temp) such a system is simple, a group like Anonymous could simple mass email just keywords and 100% the WWW would crawl for a few days, and the result: garbage in, garbage out. Another method id to mass tweet/FB or any ‘On the watch’ SM app, and state a line that infers a head of state has been killed, we did see the stock market fall when one tweet managed to give a fake fact just last month, and why this was taken and became reactive, was simply the priority of the ‘person’ at hand.
@Fernado#15, yes typing BM will get you flagged, and yes you emails are also read, even delayed, analyzed and sent, this can occur in nano seconds or hours. days depending on the volume. Events also steer the keywords, and also make a focus (Priority) ‘Boston’ would now be added, and older keywords that are less needed become secondary, but are never removed! So I petty those with the Boston terrier (Dog and not Boston terror) as the system also flags typo’s much like word can.
End of the day if you are in the US, UK etc and you do have a phone, email and credit card, someone can see where you stop to fuel (Estimate how many Kms you drive), what you buy (Even look at food group to see if it indicates an ethnic preference), where you eat, where you frequent (Social), what you drink, what you wear – all with times and dates; all that data can not only summarize you lifestyle, but your budget, and give a pretty good picture of your habits. Great ‘sellable’ info on a potential consumer – Or if you were flagged for other reasons ( Typing BM), the system would do the same and highlight anything that was not routine (Creatures of habit), i.e. you bought flowers and it’s not your wife’s B’day, or you overnighter in a Hotel, you take short trips to a particular destination, it would try and correlate any event or person with the same anomaly.
This of course is complex and in turn needs a ‘Human’ analyst to further analyze, then you are placed in specialized DB’s, like i2, where even fragmented data sets are included (Partial phone numbers, names, relationships, contacts etc) and we all know it’s human to err!
Just think, you engage in a topic online, you happen to be buy a pressure cooker,you planned a trip to Boston with the Kid’s, own a Dog, and you are in a world of hurt without being involved…
Posted by: kev | Jun 6 2013 23:30 utc | 18
As there seem to float quite a lot of misunderstandings, let’s look at some relevant facts.
“Meta data” are data that are used/needed to process some data (the content). In the context of large observation/control projects sometimes only or mainly that part of meta data that are not usually available for normal users are considered meta data.
An example: an email.
The content, as considered by the user, of an email is evidently the information he wishes to confer such as some text for the adressee.
In order to process and transfer the email some further data are needed, sometimes being generated by the system (the users computer) itself. Examples are sender information, target information (the recipients email adress), date and time, a subject, aso.
This example also shows an important aspect of the term “meta data”, it is relative and changing, depending on the perspective. At the user level sender and recipient adress are meta data; they are not part of the content desired to be transmitted but merely a technical necessity.
As soon as the email is transmitted trough the Internet that changes. Now, these technically required data become content (jargon: payload) too; The systems transmitting data on the internet only care about data packets, for them both, sender email adress and original email content are just payload and only the data these “transmission systems” need to transmitt those data packets are considered payload (by them).
The important point is that, no matter which data were considered meta data on the technical side, they had one thing in common: those data were needed for mere technical reasons (and actually are, to a large degree, discarded (“deleted”) as soon as some technical task such as transmitting some data packet between any two points is completed.
This innocent purely technical machinery becomes dark and evil, when all those data are collected and processed for *non-technical purposes*. And the real danger consists of two main vectors:
– The collection and storage
Reason: All those bits and pieces are quite meaningless and innocent techno-junk by themselves (at least most of them). By not discarding but collecting them information is created that, while consisting of small innocent pieces, alltogether creates a “picture” (similar to a puzzle but way more dangerous).
– The processing and, in particular, the combining (and rearranging)
An example again for non-tech readers: Some (1) traffic camera taking a picture, say, every minute so as to allow traffic controllers to have an overall impression of the traffic situation in a large city is rather innocent and the information relating to a single person is very small.
However, collecting all those pictures from this and all other cameras creates a completely new and very extensive information layer potentially including very many citizens. When in a final step some image analysis software scans and process all those pictures and then processes and correlates the information gathered, an evil regime can trace where any citizen went and, correlating and processing that again, they can learn e.g. about relations between citizens.
“observing, spying the internet”
At first sight the internet seems to be an overwhelmingly large and wild parallel universe. There are, after all billions of systems interconnected.
Looking closer though there are actually excellent preconditions for observation. The reason for that is the way data are transmitted.
Actually there are rather few central nodes where pretty everyone interconnects. Data aren’t travelling wildly around. When you connect to the internet you do so through your provider. This provider (ISP) has a (usually rather small) network, say, in your city and some cities around. In order to have your data travelling all over the planet you ISP must, simply speaking, have an ISP himself. Usually that major ISP is one of the companies having cables on a considerably larger scale, say, all over France or possibly even all over major parts of Europe.
Now, when (grossly simplified) you, sitting in France, wend an email to a friend in, say, Argentina, your data packets must travel through quite some networks. For example you yourself connect through “France ISP” who has interconnections with neighbours such as “German ISP” and “Spain ISP” as well as to some large international ISPs such as Level3 or Global Crossing who have capacities on major transatlantic cables.
So, your ISP “France ISP”, in order to send your email to Argentina, connects to, say, “Global ISP 5” who can transmitt packets tofrom zusa east cost. Global ISP 5 again is interconnected to “Americas 3 ISP” who happens to transport data packets between north and south America connecting to “Argentina ISP”.
So, while communicating across the globe your email was sent over just a few large networks across the globe. In order to do so those ISPs must interconnect their cables and networks somewhere. And actually they do. Those points are called “internet exchanges” and the most important (because cross connecting the most ISPs) one in France is called “PAIX” (Paris Internet eXchange).
It is there, at those IXes, where basically all internet traffic must and will pass through. And it is there where secret services can quite comfortably look at any and all traffic – and, if desired, store it.
But wait, it gets worse. The scheme I elaborated actually is valid throughout the world – except zusa. in zusa the major IXes (sometimes called “NAP” there) are associated with private companies. The major node is “Equinix”, named after the company that runs the major part of zusa IX nodes as well as a major ISP.
The situation is similar on the telephony side and there, like on the internet side, many of the major global players like Equinix are present (often controlling) on most if not all major ISes in the world.
All together it can be said that the zusa regime, by having contracts (or secret court orders) with just a dozen large corporations basically controls not only the zusa but actually internet and tel. traffic throughout major parts of the world.
A final remark:
facebook and google might play it along the line being forced by court orders. Actually, however, there is solid reason to assume that many major players like google have since quite a while an increasingly cozy relationship with the military industrial complex. And no wonder, the interests of the player “nicely” fit: google wants data mining (such as processing email contents) for commercial reasons, mainly advertising, while nsa wants quite the same albeit for different reasons.
Posted by: Mr. Pragma | Jun 7 2013 21:36 utc | 46
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