NSA: That ginormous effort to slurp up Americans' phone records that Snowden exposed? Ehhh, we don't need that no more The NSA's mass-logging of people's phone calls and text messages, at home and abroad – a surveillance program introduced after the September 11, 2001 terror attacks – is set to end as it's no longer worth the hassle. The blanket spying, which hoovered up the metadata for all calls and texts made by US citizens as well as …
The NSA has a new program just as invasivel, but not yet leaked to Joe Public. No doubt the new program is declared legal under the NSA's latest round of classified legal opinions, twisting whatever privacy-related safeguards are in current law to allow their new snooping.
Nah... they'll just let it sit at the request of the White House and claim they're not slurping everyone's data, just the "bad guys". Bad guys including democrats, folks who are no longer following certain people on Twitter, anyone working in the White House, and maybe all the news networks including Fox since they've been giving the administration crap lately.
Icon: Well... I think I'm trolling certain commentards. But then again, truth is stranger than fiction so who knows what will happen or who will have their data, etc. slurped?
Bzzzt!
Crossing Sci-Fi storylines.
Can't do that.
Seriously you know you're bad when a guy like me who was an engineering student (read math science geek) who has to criticize your literature references. Ok, so the only A that I got in English was for an intro-to-scify class where I had to borrow paper so I could take the final and finished in 45 mins because I ran out of paper. (He gave me an A- because of that.)
Bonus points... what was the name of the war in the Gibson's novels where some of the characters got messed up in the head?
Maybe....
Or they could have done what Obama wanted... the Telcos own the data and then give access to the NSA as needed. Logistically there are tools that they could use to pull the data as needed then doing more analytics on the minimized result set. Its more difficult, but not impossible considering that this isn't real time analytics.
Personally, I'd rather have the metadata.There can be some very cool things that you can do with it.
Not to mention use it for non-NSA things like cracking down in SIP use in telco scams.
Ironically Zuckerberg as well as being a Data Source also actually resembles Data from Star Trek the Next Generation, although its disputable which possesses more personality.
The truth really is stranger than fiction one can certainly vouch for that.
They lied about the existence of the programme and lied about details of it, even to congress, after Snowden leaked the info.
The so called conspiracy nutters knew for years that this sort of programme existed all along. They wernt called nutters after the leaks. I wonder how many said "I told you so"?
I remember people I worked with laughing at me when I started telling them about DRM and how bad it was and that it was coming, that they would suffer for it. I held back the "I told you so" when they started crying to me a few years later about how their CD dont work and how they cant lend their sister a track or two. They wernt laughing anymore, while I went back to listening to all the OGG vorbis files I had amassed on my player that knew nothing of DRM. They asked me for help and I was basically thinking "sorry, I dont do mp3's. I moved on from where you are stuck years ago. I dont have an ipod, avoided that, and I never played a Sony rootkit enabled CD in my PC because I knew I shouldnt."
So I'm taking a page out of the book I used to read when I was young, the book that made me suspicious of groups like the NSA and of the existence of the programmes. I was called a conspiracy nutter and had to put up with people assuming I believed not just in aliens (well I think that anyone who thinks we are the only life in our own galaxy are totally mental) but that they were visiting us and controlling our brains :D
So to all those who before Snowden revealed it all: I told you so.
And to the same people, who will still think that the NSA are staffed by angelic beings that would never lift a finger to do anything bad , evan after they did: I dont believe them. They have a replacement or are simply trying to get us to lower our guard by pretending to not run that programme anymore. Why, would I believe anything they say about this subject?
I bet those people I wrote that to are immaturely doing impressions of me wearing a tin foil hat and shouting at the skies to ward of the alien invasion forces.
Snowden didn't expose anything that wasn't already well known public information. He simply released some of what was being grabbed.
A good analogy is that everyone knows confidential medical records exist, and seeing someone's confidential file doesn't tell us anything we didn't know except their personal details.
Echelon has been known to the public for over 50 years. Snowden's claim to be a whistle blower was pretty flimsy even before he basically admitted he was working for Russia all along.
"An attack of conscience or have the super-snoops got something better now?"
That thought crossed my mind immediately when I last re-entered the US. There were no agents digging through my bags and asking my where I'd been, and the only explanation I could think of was that they already know where I've been. Maybe Visa has been tattling on me, and the feds now know that I'm totally boring.
It's kind of a shame, because there used to be so many fun conversations:
Agent: "What did you do in Medellin?"
Traveler: "You mean who."
Everyone puts everything on social media anyway nowadays. Who actually makes phone calls apart from crusties like us? And those calls are generally explaining that a train's late of cancelled.
For the odd byte or two not on social media, Intel and AMD have helpfully built in some useful CPU backdoors, some deliberate, some perhaps less so.
... Just when every service, commercial or non-profit, is inexplicably asking or demanding user phone numbers. Hand offs?
My solution: If some service or other is demanding your phone number, don’t give it. Give THEIR phone number. Let them go onto the snoop lists and RoboCall lists. Never give away your phone number except to friends and highly-trusted services (IOW not FacePlantBook or Gaggle). Period.
If some service or other is demanding your phone number, don’t give it. Give THEIR phone number.
I've been doing the same. First iteration I'll try a "n/a" in the phone field. If they insist, I'll give them their number.
Unless I really trust them and want them to phone me back. But I prefer to use email which can be dealt with at my leisure, so I don't give anyone my phone number.
The NSA has come up with so many innovative ways to lie about what it does that it's impossible to learn anything from what they say publicly or the overwhelming majority of what they say privately. Here is some pretty interesting perspective from an American congressperson:
Maybe the NSA fears other TLAs gearing up somehow to be able to subpoena their records. Ha ha. Once they've denied 100% coverage, they'll be able to respond to every request with a "no, sorry, we don't have that record."
No, I agree with what everybody has been hinting at. They'll still be hoovering up petabytes, they'll just be slightly, ever so slightly, selective.
The real NSA mantra is to collect as much as data as possible all the time, so this does not fit in to that.
They would never give up a data source unless it was completely useless and they have argued for years that this type of collection was 100% needed.
Think that goes to show whatever the NSA say, you can't trust their word.
Hmmmm? ..... Google Tracks Your Location And Shares It With Police, Even When Your Phone Is Off
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