The NSA and your privacy

[lloydnoise]

so much data, no agency on earth would be capable of doing much scary with it. That said it's totally immoral and they should totally stop doing it (or prove it's been useful enough as a program to continue)

If you want to spy on people you don't need a lot of space. Especially not if you have a big budget for fast packet analyzers.
Plus that new datacenter they're building will have about 1 trillion terabytes of storage capacity.

1 terabyte holds 4 years of audio at telephone quality. With beter compression you would need 54x less space.

its not about space, its about intelligent interpretation of the data, this can be automated but it will never be truly useful without the contextual analysis skills of a human being - to make sense out of the mountains of crap this sort of mining gathers. Nate Silver writes some good stuff on the subject in The Signal and the Noise, worth a read

[NilsFG]

so much data, no agency on earth would be capable of doing much scary with it. That said it's totally immoral and they should totally stop doing it (or prove it's been useful enough as a program to continue)

If you want to spy on people you don't need a lot of space. Especially not if you have a big budget for fast packet analyzers.
Plus that new datacenter they're building will have about 1 trillion terabytes of storage capacity.

1 terabyte holds 4 years of audio at telephone quality. With beter compression you would need 54x less space.

its not about space, its about intelligent interpretation of the data, this can be automated but it will never be truly useful without the contextual analysis skills of a human being - to make sense out of the mountains of crap this sort of mining gathers. Nate Silver writes some good stuff on the subject in The Signal and the Noise, worth a read

It's not always about interpreting all data, but can be about targetting one specific person. I've had some fun with packet sniffing and analyzing network traffic and I can tell you, it's not extremely hard to pinpoint an identity (can be an abstract identity) to a stream of information. Especially not when a cleartext package from facebook or google or other tracking cookies enters that stream. True, I've never worked on a big scale but the NSA are big players and technologically they are quite possible a few years ahead of us. If they can effectivily pinpoint identities linked to an unnamed/named "profile", and just store the data without processing, they could later give it some more context whilst targetting one person matching that profile. That's pretty much my concern; not them analyzing the masses and counting hashtags about terrorism, but having the power to target a single person if they want to; if you understand what I mean.

Maybe it's not 100% possible. But I wouldn't say it's completely impossible; we don't know if and how much more technologically advanced they are. Which wouldn't surprise me after DES and its S-Boxes.

Anyway I'll check that book out, looks interesting.

[Laszlo]

... they could later give it some more context whilst targetting one person matching that profile. That's pretty much my concern; not them analyzing the masses and counting hashtags about terrorism, but having the power to target a single person if they want to; if you understand what I mean.

This is what I was driving at. The information could be used for any number of underhanded reasons by whomever is deemed worthy of controlling it - political leverage, blackmail, stock market manipulation etc. etc.
I just think it's an incredibly powerful tool for a (presumably) small group of people to have who aren't accountable to anyone.

[wormcode]

... they could later give it some more context whilst targetting one person matching that profile. That's pretty much my concern; not them analyzing the masses and counting hashtags about terrorism, but having the power to target a single person if they want to; if you understand what I mean.

This is what I was driving at. The information could be used for any number of underhanded reasons by whomever is deemed worthy of controlling it - political leverage, blackmail, stock market manipulation etc. etc.
I just think it's an incredibly powerful tool for a (presumably) small group of people to have who aren't accountable to anyone.

Yeah, and info people will pay big money for access to.
Data mining is just like normal mining, they collect shitloads of seemingly useless stuff but within it they have a few gems. What I mentioned about twitter being one of the biggest government data mining projects, the US gov has it archived and they have been using it to target people who stand at odds with them and press charges against them. It's becoming more common for people to be arrested for what they say on Twitter or Facebook. Look at the EDL/Islamist/Right wing thing going on right now, people are being arrested in a matter of hours for typing stupid remarks on Facebook.

The whole Echelon thing as well, with keywords being flagged during conversations is totally possible. Everyone's used their phone's voice recognition or searched Google using voice, sites like Midomi can decipher what song you're humming, and it's incredibly accurate. That's just normal public 'civilian' stuff and the technology is amazing.

[collige]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/investiga ... story.html
Part 2.

[cloquet]

PRISM was inevitable, they were always going to do this, although that doesn't make it any easier to swallow.

I think people's view of privacy in general is troubling - instagram, celebrity gossip, facebook, twitter & so on only serve to illustrate this further - at this point privacy is almost a dirty word. A lot of people dismiss the surveillance/privacy issue, they trot out the whole "I've got nothing to hide, it doesn't affect me" routine; well one day you might. It's not just about the present, this sort of thing paves the way for all sorts of nightmarish scenarios.

It's scary how complacent a lot of people are about this stuff, our civil liberties are being chewed up & spat out and nobody seems to care. The anti-terror argument is wearing thin at this point, just feels like a desperate attempt to maintain a climate of fear.

Everyone is a potential threat.

One day our interest in you is bound to pay off...

[Mason]

It's not just about the present, this sort of thing paves the way for all sorts of nightmarish scenarios.

what do you consider one of these nightmarish scenarios just out of interest?

[NilsFG]

It's not just about the present, this sort of thing paves the way for all sorts of nightmarish scenarios.

what do you consider one of these nightmarish scenarios just out of interest?

-->

The information could be used for any number of underhanded reasons by whomever is deemed worthy of controlling it - political leverage, blackmail, stock market manipulation etc. etc.

Oh and https://www.eff.org/nsa-spying/timeline

[cloquet]

It's not just about the present, this sort of thing paves the way for all sorts of nightmarish scenarios.

what do you consider one of these nightmarish scenarios just out of interest?

As quoted by Nils for one.

Can you not work it out for yourself? You've got a corrupt elite motivated by selfishness & greed with the ability to spy on every single member of the population, the ability to define what a crime is, the ability to make & change laws to justify what they're doing, control of the military, the ability to lock people up indefinitely and the ability to ignore or bypass the current laws.

Is that not nightmarish in itself???

Edit: Can't understand why this thread isn't pages & pages long and near the top.

[Laszlo]

Can't understand why this thread isn't pages & pages long and near the top.

When this shit is happening like this daily and corruption, self interest of politicians and people in authority in general abuse given powers, it becomes normalised and people have the 'doesn't surprise me' attitude and they feel they are powerless, unless they give up their comforts and cosy routine and fight for freedoms and privacy. This is why in other countries where 'me' culture is less prevalent, materialism less worshiped, they get off their arses and do something about it.

[hugh]

wouldn't you need literally millions of people working at these security centres in order to monitor what the entire population was doing, I mean America has hundreds of millions of people making up the populace, so how realistically could they ACTUALLY monitor all this stuff?

[Pedro Sánchez]

wouldn't you need literally millions of people working at these security centres in order to monitor what the entire population was doing, I mean America has hundreds of millions of people making up the populace, so how realistically could they ACTUALLY monitor all this stuff?

Computers would analyze audio based on sophisticated algorithms, which would sort out buzzwords and phrases even local accents, then filter it down for human viewing, to either dismiss it as harmless or of importance.

[hugh]

wouldn't you need literally millions of people working at these security centres in order to monitor what the entire population was doing, I mean America has hundreds of millions of people making up the populace, so how realistically could they ACTUALLY monitor all this stuff?

Computers would analyze audio based on sophisticated algorithms, which would sort out buzzwords and phrases even local accents, then filter it down for human viewing, to either dismiss it as harmless or of importance.

I wonder where the buck stops....where does this algorithm draw the line on what is worth pursuing and what is not? What exactly does it pursue? Does it pursue things outside of immediate national security.
Lots of questions. It's all very unnerving and I feel like people should really be kicking off about this. I always imagined Americans to be very anti-state-surveillance as it clearly violates the liberties and freedoms of 'MURICANs so what is the general response over there?

[wormcode]

The general response seems mixed. Some support it. The gov and media has spent many years instilling fear into the people so that things like this are either supported or are at least accepted as just normal and necessary.

NSA provided the U.K.’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) with access to Prism since at least June 2010.

A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves.
― Edward R. Murrow

Those laws, being forged for universal application, are in perpetual conflict with personal interest, just as personal interest is always in contradiction with the general interest. Good for society, our laws are very bad for the individuals whereof it is composed; for, if they one time protect the individual, they hinder, trouble, fetter him for three quarters of his life.
- Marquis de Sade

Crime is naught but misdirected energy. So long as every institution of today, economic, political, social, and moral, conspires to misdirect human energy into wrong channels; so long as most people are out of place doing the things they hate to do, living a life they loathe to live, crime will be inevitable, and all the laws on the statutes can only increase, but never do away with, crime.
-Emma Goldman

If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.
- Carl Sagan

Government is not reason, it is not eloquence – it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and fearful master.
― George Washington

The government is merely a servant -- merely a temporary servant; it cannot be its prerogative to determine what is right and what is wrong, and decide who is a patriot and who isn't. Its function is to obey orders, not originate them.
― Mark Twain

“Freedom isn't free. It shouldn't be a bragging point that "Oh, I don't get involved in politics," as if that makes you somehow cleaner. No, that makes you derelict of duty in a republic. Liars and panderers in government would have a much harder time of it if so many people didn't insist on their right to remain ignorant and blindly agreeable.
― Bill Maher

[NilsFG]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_%28 ... program%29

[lloydnoise]

wouldn't you need literally millions of people working at these security centres in order to monitor what the entire population was doing, I mean America has hundreds of millions of people making up the populace, so how realistically could they ACTUALLY monitor all this stuff?

Computers would analyze audio based on sophisticated algorithms, which would sort out buzzwords and phrases even local accents, then filter it down for human viewing, to either dismiss it as harmless or of importance.

a lot of this is to do with metadata, which isn't realtime documentation of a call or email, but rather the ability to build up profiles of who you speak to, and when, where you call most often and so on. I'm sure most people wouldn't register, but you can be sure if you have some reason to call someone in Pakistan every couple of weeks, your name would flag up at some point.
The slow rise of tyranny is something a lot of people just don't see coming, the general apathy about this sort of subject depresses me a bit. I work with 8-10 guys, none of whom had heard about this yesterday.

[NilsFG]

https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/08/tech ... =1&hp&_r=3&

[kidshuffle]

http://gawker.com/the-nsa-sent-a-takedo ... -512085836

[pkay]

still feel less evasive than some of the CCTV in other countries. Worst thing government has is me trying to get bitches to show me their titties when they're drunk. Fair game reall

[Reese_Liar]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/ju ... rveillance