Snowden Strikes Again: NSA Mapping Social Connections of US Citizens 513
McGruber writes "The New York Times is reporting on yet another NSA revelation: for the last three years, the National Security Agency has been exploiting its huge collections of data to create sophisticated graphs of some Americans' social connections that can identify their associates, their locations at certain times, their traveling companions and other personal information. 'The agency can augment the communications data with material from public, commercial and other sources, including bank codes, insurance information, Facebook profiles, passenger manifests, voter registration rolls and GPS location information, as well as property records and unspecified tax data, according to the documents. They do not indicate any restrictions on the use of such "enrichment" data, and several former senior Obama administration officials said the agency drew on it for both Americans and foreigners.' In a memorandum, NSA analysts were 'told that they could trace the contacts of Americans as long as they cited a foreign intelligence justification.' 'That could include anything from ties to terrorism, weapons proliferation or international drug smuggling to spying on conversations of foreign politicians, business figures or activists. Analysts were warned to follow existing "minimization rules," which prohibit the NSA from sharing with other agencies names and other details of Americans whose communications are collected, unless they are necessary to understand foreign intelligence reports or there is evidence of a crime. The agency is required to obtain a warrant from the intelligence court to target a "U.S. person" — a citizen or legal resident — for actual eavesdropping.'"
Living Overseas? (Score:5, Informative)
Upon arriving in the USA very recently my wife was flagged going through the mettle detector at IAD (she was carrying our 3 month old daughter so the TSA told her they had to do some extra checks since she had a baby in a sling, dafuq?). She spent the next 45 minutes getting checked, rechecked, patted down (enhanced pat down; under the waistband, hand up the legs until it meets "resistance", hands swiping breasts, etc.), having her carry-on bags checked and rechecked for bomb residue, all in the name of "You were carrying a baby in a sling".
I'm trying to be as honest and non-paranoid as possible in all of this. But these leaks from Snowden really do give rise to questions about how large my NSA profile has grown, simply because I live overseas.
Re:news media has lost interest? (Score:5, Informative)
Well, seeing that the U.S. media is totally in the bag for Obama, it's not too much of a surprise.
Seymour Hersh himself - a man who would know and who spent his entire life rooting out government crimes - just said in The Guardian: "There are some people - the New York Times still has investigative journalists but they do much more of carrying water for the president than I ever thought they would ... it's like you don't dare be an outsider any more." [theguardian.com]
Re:So Obama lied again (Score:5, Informative)
Now, that's nice. Let's assume for a moment that's true - that's not saying anything about automatic collection of data, about computer analysis of such data, about how long data can be kept etc. "No-one is listening to your calls" is a complete red herring. It would be better if their methodology were based on purely human-conducted surveillance. That kind of work is expensive, and therefore must have a limited scope. What is apparently being built now is much worse than having some person listening to people's calls.
Everything we're being told is going on now just reeks of the Total Information Awareness programs which were, to some extent, supposedly discontinued. The goal seems to be the same - make it cheap enough to have total surveillance capability of everything anyone does. You can't do that with humans, but if you manage to build a computer system broad and smart enough, you can do a whole lot more. Humans aren't being phased out of the process because they present a larger risk to the population being monitored - they're just too expensive.
Fortunately, automated intel data analysis is still a very tough problem, but it seems clear a lot of work is being done to "improve" things in that field. That's not good news, it's bad news. Less human involvement in this context means less legal oversight and greater overall capabilities. You can't jail a computer system.
Re:People don't care because they're too stupid (Score:2, Informative)
They say "oh, that's terrible!" and that's the end of the discussion. While they may say it's terrible, they do absolutely nothing about it and just let it be
Yeah? What are YOU doing about it, AC? Some of us have the guts to put our real names out there and protest this (yes, McGrew is my real name). Who are you, coward?
The majority of American citizens voted for this behavior
Bullshit. If either one of the Demublican candidates for the last Presidential election had campaigned on the "we're going to spy on Americans" platform he'd have lost in a landslide.
No Surprise (Score:5, Informative)
If you look at the roots of all of this it goes back to the 1979 Supreme Court Ruling in Smith vs. Maryland [wikipedia.org] where:
“A person has no legitimate expectation of privacy in information he voluntarily turns over to third parties’’
The case centered around the installation of a pen register, which records phone numbers dialed in the phone company office. As all of the current press indicates the NSA and other Federal Agencies and Administrations to justify scooping up all of information they can. In 1979 it was difficult to trace phone calls because most of the local COs were analog and getting this kind of data meant installing devices, requiring court orders, anybody remember rotary dial? The 1979 ruling has therefore been applied now in our current era where this information is "at hand." Using this we can now see why the large Data Center in Utah is being built to collect the billions of Call Detail Records and other Internet IP data that the NSA can gobble up. Strangely enough the safeguards that protect a US citizen fall down suddenly if you have contact with a foreign country. Let's see, going on vacation to Europe this year? You're sucked into the system. Have friends or family members overseas? You're sucked into the system. Compound that over zealous approach to collection and the fact that they can save the data for up to 10 years for historical analysis and you have a huge storage problem. Now if you add it Network Graph Analysis, you'll be sucked in if your friends or family members have contacts with people in other countries. That means effectively everybody in US is on a graph somewhere and it's being used to create fake evidence chains against your fellow citizens. [disinfo.com] I'm not advocating crime or terrorism in any way but there has to be oversight of law enforcement in this nation, with the NSA scoping up everything they can you have a police state where evidence can be created out of thin air and you can't challenge it's authenticity.
The ramifications of this are staggering and I for one have been in touch with my congressman and written to both my Senators to voice my opposition to it but the only way to fix this is to end the two party stranglehold of our government that has allowed this to happen behind closed doors. The FISA court needs to be abolished and the NSA systems need to be dismantled. That won't happen when you have elected officials who don't fear the electorate and the only way that will change is to force our government to enact:
Re:So Obama lied again (Score:5, Informative)
10-26-2013 Rally Against Surveillance (Score:5, Informative)
October 26th, 2013
Re:news media has lost interest? (Score:5, Informative)
Interestingly, major European news outlets aren't running with this either. At least not the ones I checked (BBC in the UK, N24 in Germany, YLE in Finland).
Though that may be more due to the copy & paste culture of major news outlets these days.
However, Russia Today and Japan Times are frontpaging this story just as you would expect.
Re:People don't care because they're too stupid (Score:4, Informative)
"To summarize: I own a gun not because I expect to use it against the goverment but because I want the goverment to know that if it becomes to unjust it can't just cart me of in the middle of the night...."
You actually believe that don't you?
If they can kill and grab Osama Bin Laden deep inside a foreign nation when he was surrounded by a few armed family members and Pakistan would have put a stop to it if they had chance then your piddly little firearm by itself isn't going to do anything to protect you.
If they want to grab you then you wont even know they're coming. They'll have their gloved hand over your mouth and a gun to your head before you can even think about your weapon.
I swear Americans have bought way too much into the whole Hollywood thing. Everyone seems to think they're an action hero, a one man army that could single handedly take down the state.
The only thing protecting you is the fact that you just don't matter to them.
Re:People don't care because they're too stupid (Score:4, Informative)
Armed rebellion is just about the most ineffective way to deal with this situation. The best, in fact the only realistic option is for there to be more people like Snowden and for people to take what those heroes release and use it to change the system. Make encryption more effective so that the spying on everyone becomes impossible, use the information to reveal the secrets for those in power and bring them down.
The system is far from invulnerable. Politicians in particular are easily manipulated. Human beings are always the biggest weakness in any system.