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.'"
Paranoia is dwarfed by the truth (Score:2, Interesting)
After the first few leaks by snowden, we thought "holy shit". but then we got some rebuttals by the nsa/us govt in general, and then more snowden leaks showing that in fact the rebuttals were false statements, etc. even the most paranoid among us were wrong. the scope is still bigger than non-schizophrenics thought possible. Remember a year or 2 ago when there was a claim that the NSA/USGovt had backdoored a widely used crypto? the response was "this guy is either a liar or crazy. how credible is he?" even though the spec for the crypto is public, rather than sling mud, look at the code. i know its hard, very complicated math, easy to obfuscate in code. etc. but if it was the same as the snowden leaks have pointed to, we could have known this back then if people didnt just be mudslingers and spent time investigating rather than whining about it.
Re:People don't care because they're too stupid (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:People don't care because they're too stupid (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:People don't care because they're too stupid (Score:5, Interesting)
While I am a bit cynical myself, I'd have to disagree with the statement that no-one care about all of this. Despite the mainstream media's systemic attempts to bury this story, the NSA revelations are a sledgehammer slowly pounding at the complacent foundations of the free internet. This issue is simply too huge to go away.
The NSA is literally turning into an Orwellian Ministry of Information. It has commandeered the internet, and is strong-arming American companies into doing its bidding, regardless of the effect on their or their customers rights or freedoms, and regardless of the effect on America's reputation for free speech and free enterprise.
It might be easy to ignore each individual blow of revelation, but when a big pillar crumbles, it becomes a little difficult to look away or hide the growing sense of dread. The closure of Lavabit and Silent Circle was a body blow to the notion of free speech and free enterprise on the US internet.
A lot of people probably felt that the likes of Facebook, Google, MS, would be locked down first, with the creep moving down the chain to email providers, independent sites, and finally, in extremis, to small independent secure email service providers. Instead this has been turned on its head; the independent man, in business for himself, was the first pin to fall. The message is clear: You cannot set up a website, email service, or any other internet business in the United States without the prior and/or post-facto approval of the National Security Agency.
A dream is dying. People like yourself escape through cynicism. Others escape through denial, or fantasy. But the reality is we are living in a nightmare, surrounded by a growing sense of dread in a global spy and surveillance network that has spiralled out of all reasonable proportion and probably control.
The NSA is turning the internet into at best a panopticon, and at worst a prison for our whole society. They have slowly built a fortress of concrete, wire, and guard-towers around the free web. Edward Snowden is outside, slowly pounding on the wall, hoping some of those inside will hear enough to notice that they need to find a way to break out, to stop the construction before it's too late.
I think he's succeeding. As cynical as I am, I think that as the revelations continue, more people are starting to wake up to the reality of the nightmare that the NSA was trying to create while they slept. We need an internet that is encrypted, anonymous, and decentralised by default; And Mr. Snowden's sledgehammer may be inspiring a new generation of hackers to finally create it.
The other shoe is about to drop... (Score:4, Interesting)
The other shoe is about to drop in the form of "Why didn't you save my little girl from that pedophile?"
People are realizing that the government corruption (ordinary type), violent gangs, racketteering gangs, people cheating on taxes with overseas accounts, drug runners, drug gangs and novice terrorists were all KNOWN ABOUT THE WHOLE TIME.
Recent uptick in the oddball "trading child porn" people has got to be them releasing data on the most heinous cases.
At some point, someone is going to articulate all the ways our own government was complicit and knowningly allowing all kinds of crime to go on, some of which with real heart breaking stories for the victims.
Those folks better fucking worry real hard about another Snoweden releasing the personal information of the guys who know, or should have known about all of it. They had better clean up a lot of fucking crime real fucking fast or we'll be hearing stories of "yet another government 'office worker' dragged to death behind some redneck's truck" because the file showed the now dead pile of meat knew about 15 pedophile cases.
Re:Even More Reason to... (Score:5, Interesting)
Burner phones are getting hard. You can buy a phone second-hand for cash easily enough, but getting it on the cell network is trickier - even prepaid SIMs usually require a bank card for initial activation. It's a result of deliberate government pressure to eliminate untraceable cellphones - not for reasons of terrorism, but to make identifying drug traffickers and sellers easier.
Re:news media has lost interest? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:People don't care because they're too stupid (Score:3, Interesting)
In most of your examples, the targeted populations were divested of their firearms prior to the atrocities. In the last one, people voluntarily complied.
They voluntarily complied AT GUN POINT. Try to say no to the para-military police with ILLEGAL ASSAULT weapon in hand screaming to let them search your house.
Xbox One designed to further this program (Score:1, Interesting)
Remember all those paid Microsoft shills telling you that only tin-foil hat morons believed Microsoft's Xbox One was designed from the ground up to spy on citizens in their homes?
The Xbox One dedicates more than ONE EIGHTH of all its hardware resources to implementing NSA full surveillance projects. The Kinect sensor bar (that initially Microsoft mandated for ALL console use, along with 'always on' Internet connection) contains high resolution visible light and infra-red cameras, full body motion tracking systems, and a microphone array designed to track multiple conversations, and/or to hear conversations in adjoining rooms.
EVERY Xbox (with Kinect active) is ALWAYS monitoring each person that enters the room, and takes full facial photographs of each individual. Once a day at least, this information is uploaded to NSA servers in the cloud (disguised as encrypted data flow passed off as Microsoft data). Of course, the NSA know the location of the console, and thus have an existing list of probable residents, allowing their software to use face recognition methods to draw up 'circles of friends/associates' .
Now the usual shills will respond with tales about how this is 'impossible' now the console can be used without Kinect, or much internet connection time. However, they are playing on the stupidity of you, the Slashdot reader. It was ALREADY possible not to buy the console, so everyone already had the option to defeat this form of NSA spying. Bad publicity was threatening to make the Xbone a disaster, and the NSA gains nothing if the console doesn't sell. Allowing the possibility of deactivating the worst spying elements makes no difference, since market research by Microsoft and the NSA reassures them that 95%+ of Xbone customers will always leave the Kinect attached, and will have a permanent Internet connection. The 5% of Xbone users who defeat NSA spying are no different logically from those who refuse to buy the console in the first place, and thus do NOT alter the situation.
Every online Xbone reports itself to NSA master servers, and NSA agents can begin streaming video feeds from ANY console within 100 milliseconds. As I said, the NSA hardware is UNIQUE within the console, and such video streams (capture, compress, encrypt, and upload) have ZERO impact of the apparent performance of the console, even if the owner is currently engaged in AAA gaming with video feeds to their friends.
Why be a sheeple? Why find yourself in ten years time reading reports from a new 'Snowden' detailing Bill Gates' intimate partnership with the NSA. Gates is a proud eugenicist in the mould of those vile evil American eugenicists that created the depraved doctrines that Adolf Hitler so publicly adopted. Gates sees ordinary Americans as garbage to be monitored and controlled.
Your home is the final frontier for your masters. Once they persuade you that you have ZERO right to privacy there, the though police have won their final victory.
Re:People don't care because they're too stupid (Score:5, Interesting)
You want this to stop?
Then do something about it. The way to make a difference is in the one thing we, ("the people") can directly affect... .Voting !!
Make it an issue next November. If you make it known this is important to you, it will be important to them. Every candidate should be asked his/her position and be held accountable for following through once elected.
Keep a flame under the media, they print what they believe is interesting to their audience. If this is perceived as a persistent hot topic, it will not fade from public view.
I wonder how this would be different if Snowden had waited until 2014.......... ?
Re:news media has lost interest? (Score:5, Interesting)
As a foreigner, I have to tell you that the US media isn't in the bag for Obama. It is, actually, in the bag of the US ruling aristocracy, whose current public figurehead is Obama. They've routinely pulled the exact same shenanigans whether the US aristocracy's public figurehead comes from either party.
In fact, I don't really know if it's even possible to claim that the US even has two political parties, because in spite of the public nitpicking between some controversial issues, which when you really look at it are really minor in the business of ruling a state, they actually don't diverge much in policy.
Until the average US citizen figures that, in spite of having to vote once every few years, their regime is far from democratic and isn't very different from totalitariam regimes such as those in place in fascist states such as China, this problem won't go away.
Re:Been around since at least 1999 (Score:4, Interesting)
And there's historical precedent for this: The Amsterdam city archive had detailed information about all its citizens, including "religion". When the Netherlands were occupied by the Nazis in 1940, the new government had a new query they wanted to run on this database.
OK it was manual card search in that time, but still... not many Jews in Amsterdam survived, thanks to a previous government's careful information gathering on its own people (only for beneficial reasons, but that doesn't matter to the people who will have their claws on that dataset in 20 years time).
Once the tool exists, once the mechanism is in place, it would be a waste of government money to shut it down and destroy the data, wouldn't it?
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:So Obama lied again (Score:2, Interesting)
Quit thinking the world is so binary. Just because someone says Obama is an authoritarian murderous constitution destroying lying piece of shit, doesn't mean that person is praising Republicans who are the same.
There is a third option, e.g., BOTH parties are metastasizing cancer with absolutely zero redeeming qualities.