Officials Say NSA Probed Fewer Than 300 Numbers - Broke Plots In 20 Nations 419
cold fjord writes "Yet more details about the controversy engulfing the NSA. From CNET: 'Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, explained how the program worked without violating individuals' civil rights. "We take the business records by a court order, and it's just phone numbers — no names, no addresses — put it in a lock box," Rogers told CBS News' "Face The Nation." "And if they get a foreign terrorist overseas that's dialing in to the United Sates, they take that phone number... they plug it into this big pile, if you will, of just phone numbers — it's like a phonebook without any names and any addresses with it — to see if there's a connection, a foreign terrorist connection to the United States." "When a number comes out of that lock box, it's just a phone number — no names, no addresses," he said. "If they think that's relevant to their counterterrorism investigation, they give that to the FBI. Then upon the FBI has to go out and meet all the legal standards to even get whose phone number that is."' From the AP: ' ... programs run by the National Security Agency thwarted potential terrorist plots in the U.S. and more than 20 other countries — and that gathered data is destroyed every five years. Last year, fewer than 300 phone numbers were checked against the database of millions of U.S. phone records ... the intelligence officials said in arguing that the programs are far less sweeping than their detractors allege.... both NSA programs are reviewed every 90 days by the secret court authorized by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Under the program, the records, showing things like time and length of call, can only be examined for suspected connections to terrorism, they said. The ... program helped the NSA stop a 2009 al-Qaida plot to blow up New York City subways.'"
and the database is secure (Score:4, Interesting)
He seems to want to focus on the 300 "numbers only" they checked and not the big database of "phone records" that exists. But I'm sure the "database of millions of U.S. phone records" he refers to is at least as secure as the existence of the program itself. It's not doubt more secure but that doesn't mean it's safe. And many attackers would love to just get a handful of records (congressmen, judges, candidates, ceos, opposition party leaders).
Plus I've already heard quotes from politicians and other government officials that the database needs to be more widely shared. FBI and DHS need access now. I imagine the IRS could find a few things and "improve" tax collection if it was shared with them. We better not get used to being ok with the NSA having access to "numbers only". The nature of government is to expand and make "better" use of data, not to ignore a valuable resource because of privacy concerns. And also to protect those in power, so any 3rd party leader making progress better have a squeaky clean record. One place the 2 parties can agree is on attacking any opposition to their power.
The "just a number" can be de-anonymized easily (Score:5, Interesting)
Nice how they left out that little fact. In many cases a simple Google search will already be enough. Where that fails, use the customer database of the phone service provider. I expect lifting the anonymity from a number will take significantly less than a minute, possibly less than a second.
This is classical lying by omission. It builds of the lack of understanding of the common person. De-anonymizing metadata is an easy and cheaply solvable and well understood problem.
Interesting word, "probe." (Score:4, Interesting)
They claim to have a list of millions of phone numbers, against which they only checked 300 numbers last year.
I want to know what criteria they used to generate that list of millions of phone numbers.
More precisely, I want to know what criteria they used to build the training data sets to train the classifiers that filtered through all our communications metadata (and probably our communications content data as well) in order to generate that list.
What are they looking for? How do they say that a phone call goes into the training set or stays out? That's what I want to know; not the details of Snowden's sex life or whatever the media are pushing now.
Re:I'm sure it's effective (Score:5, Interesting)
Because sunlight is the best disinfectant.
Why would them hiding even more stuff make anyone trust them more?
Missing the point... (Score:5, Interesting)
The point is not what the NSA has done with the information. The point is what they could do. Having "legally" (I use the term advisedly) obtained all this information on every American, they could now use it for any nefarious purpose. Having done so in secret, they hardly seem trustworthy.
I'm old enough to remember the days when we posted garbage at the end of messages for the "NSA line eater." Time to do that again.
Re:Proof or STFU (Score:5, Interesting)
The vast majority of Verizon's (and any US carrier's) calls are from one US number to another US number. They could just have requested all phone calls from/to a short list of foreign numbers. Or at most they would have asked for all calls to/from a list of foreign countries. That's still a lot of calls but hundreds of times less than the full call database. Then, once they had identified a US number that seems associated with foreign terrorists, they could examine all calls to/from that number and tap the line.
The court order says every call. Why would a judge give them that level of access if all they wanted was calls to/from a handful of numbers? Bottom line, the story the Congressman is telling is completely at odds with what we now know about the extent of the information the NSA requested and received.
Re:Very suspicious explanation. (Score:4, Interesting)
After multiple instances of lying or 'lying the least they could', they have given us zero reason to believe yet another explanation of the system. My belief is that this is a system used by the 'powers that be' to keep promoting the political and financial dominance of the powers that be. Whereas, the 'powers that be' is defined as those people with enough financial and political influence that set the agenda and policies of the entire world.
The reason I believe this is because reports show that Germany was one of the countries that was spied on the most. If this was a system used only to 'combat terrorism', it would make zero sense to spy on the country that has repeatedly been shown to be an ally in the 'War on Terrorism'. But, if this was a system used for financial and political gain, it would make sense to keep the most records on the countries with the largest amount of financial competition.
All power structures must answer to the law. In order to prevent the continued movement of the US towards fascism, it is our duty (the peoples') to continually be skeptical of those in power. We need to question this, shine a light on this, get it audited - and even shut it down - if this is a system that violates the US Constitution.
Re:Proof or STFU (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Bullshit (Score:5, Interesting)
First, the "we broke 20 plots" is bullshit. They have have used these tools in 20 investigations, so what? And what about the other 280 they admit to? And anyway, how many people's data was involved in each of these investigations? Dozens? Hundreds? Thousands?
Also, don't forget the government tendency to declare victory. I'm reminded of how it designates "all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants". How many of these plots would have even gone anywhere? They might've broken into someone's home who ordered some waffle mix overseas, declared him a "terrorist", shipped him off to Guantanamo Bay, then chalked up another point for the Good Guys(tm).
I tend to be a pessimist about things that happen in secret.
Re:I'm sure it's effective (Score:5, Interesting)
That poll is flawed.
If you ask Americans if they're okay with the government tapping the phones of Americans for national security, 56% say yes, but if you ask them if they're okay with the government tapping the phones of ORDINARY Americans for national security, that number flips to 58% opposing it.
The way it was worded and due to the weird ways people make assumptions about the authority of the people asking polls, most people assume that the feds were only tapping the phones of bad guys.
Re:I'm sure it's effective (Score:2, Interesting)
The problem with (B) is that now the NSA is being tasked to build tools to fight terrorists who are not overly sophisticated (by comparison). Al Qaeda and etc. are not the same as the KGB or Mossad in terms of countersurveilence. And let's face it - everyone suspected this was going on before Snowden came around. Snowden's revelations only proved what we suspected - it's not as if the people we were trying to catch didn't already know about those rumors.
Our domestic police forces don't need this level of secrecy to do their jobs and protect us. I don't see why the NSA needs this level of secrecy and the more we hear about the program, the less justifiable the secrecy becomes.
So the real question is why the NSA wants to build this panopticon surveillance state. It is partly because the NSA is now a self-perpetuating, self-justifying bureaucracy, much like the justice system is today thanks to the war on drugs. I also think it is because our leaders, especially in the military, have the same attitude that the Soviets did - the same sort of paranoia and worry about losing control. We've seen after 9/11 how civil rights that we took for granted and saw as fundamental were eroded in the name of fighting terrorism. In the future, there will be something else that happens to further erode our rights, and then the NSA's spying tools will be used in earnest, but this time without the limited checks and balances we have now with FISC and so forth.
That's why we need to fight them tooth and nail - today.
Re:I'm sure it's effective (Score:5, Interesting)
This. This is exactly how I almost turned my ultra-conservative, war-hawk, get-the-terrorists-at-any-price to stop defending the program. I just simply said, "what if the democrats had a full-blown, no-secret, Muslim run for president on the idea of diversity and part of their platform is that they would implement Sharia?"
"Well, no raghead would ever get elected."
"His Muslim friends will make cheap oil available and they will run on taxing the rich so that more people get handouts from the government. I mean, democrats already got 47%; how much harder would an additional 4% be with that?"
"Well, we'd rise up against the flagrant violations of the Constitution."
"And now, the administration calls you terrorists and starts monitoring who you call because someone else called you under the same guilt by association theory. And that is what they admit they do, they'd probably bug your phone too."
(dead silence, sound of rusty gears starting to turn again in his head) "Yeah.... They've gone too far. We've got to stop OBAMA. "
(I sigh because I got so close.)
An interesting note to that conversation is how much of that just went unchallenged because Fox News has convinced him that it is actually possible.
Re:I'm sure it's effective (Score:4, Interesting)
Just looking at a historical baseline of the spanish inquisition and catholicism.
Your're right- non religious people do bad things too. They usually need to be a sociopath to do evil things.
But religious people can do monstrous things while still being normal people. All you have to do is cross the line to "not being human" according to their religion.
Religion and nationalism allow otherwise normal people to behave like sociopaths. So they are both a bit frightening.