The National Security Agency is currently collecting the telephone records of millions of US customers of Verizon, one of America's largest telecoms providers, under a top secret court order issued in April.
The order, a copy of which has been obtained by the Guardian, requires Verizon on an "ongoing, daily basis" to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems, both within the US and between the US and other countries.
The document shows for the first time that under the Obama administration the communication records of millions of US citizens are being collected indiscriminately and in bulk – regardless of whether they are suspected of any wrongdoing.
This is episode 1293424786546 of information being revealed about the NSA monitoring (digital) communications. The whistleblowers of last year, room 614A, Echelon, ...
And this shit is spreading to other foreign governments too. This isn't "tinfoil-hat conspiracy" material, this is real and happening right now.
So please tell me, why does nobody still give a shit? Why is everybody still stuck with the whole "I don't have anything to hide so let them"-view on privacy?
The National Security Agency is currently collecting the telephone records of millions of US customers of Verizon, one of America's largest telecoms providers, under a top secret court order issued in April.
The order, a copy of which has been obtained by the Guardian, requires Verizon on an "ongoing, daily basis" to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems, both within the US and between the US and other countries.
The document shows for the first time that under the Obama administration the communication records of millions of US citizens are being collected indiscriminately and in bulk – regardless of whether they are suspected of any wrongdoing.
This is episode 1293424786546 of information being revealed about the NSA monitoring (digital) communications. The whistleblowers of last year, room 614A, Echelon, ...
And this shit is spreading to other foreign governments too. This isn't "tinfoil-hat conspiracy" material, this is real and happening right now.
So please tell me, why does nobody still give a shit? Why is everybody still stuck with the whole "I don't have anything to hide so let them"-view on privacy?
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.
Genevieve wrote:It's a universal law that the rich have to exploit the poor. Preferably violently.
The US and UK have a more authoritarian and hierarchical culture so learned helplessness is pretty prevalent. Best thing ti do is petition your government and try make an effect
I'm not sure this is as bad as it sounds tbh and depending on how they are being used and how they are being searched may even be better for the bad guys
Smoke signals and jungle drums were so much more private...
I think I'm being realistic to assume that any communication
I have through a publicly available system
is accessible by anybody technically capable of intercepting my message,
if they so choose, regardless of privacy laws.
Just the way the world is now.
If you don't want your missives scrutinized, don't use them imo.
UK police already have access to telephone records don't they? Wouldn't this just bring the US in line? They can't listen to the content, but they can see who called who and when. They need Home Office approval to listen in, I think.
We're currently in the process of arguing whether the police should have access to the same for electronic comms. Again - source/destination/time, but not content.
As a dyed-in-the-wool Liberal, it seems like more than I'd like to sign away, but as long as they're not snooping on content, I can't really see a huge invasion of privacy. I can easily see how the data would be useful for fleshing out racketeering/conspiracy charges, but not so much for mass surveillance.
Meus equus tuo altior est
"Let me eat when I'm hungry, let me drink when I'm dry.
Give me dollars when I'm hard up, religion when I die."
nowaysj wrote:I wholeheartedly believe that Michael Brown's mother and father killed him.
The EU already has the data retention directive (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Retention_Directive) which is more or less the same as what you are describing magma. On itself it isn't that bad, but part of me fears that it's just one step in a plan to total communications surveillance.
Plus a lot of these agencies do not care about the laws they should be enforcing. Pretty sure a lot of them can get away with illegally monitoring the contents of communications too.
Worst that can happen is that one of the executives gets fired.
Yeah, I agree that it's the creep we've got to watch. I certainly wouldn't want it to go any further than it has already and you need to start complaining well before they reach the actual limit.
Meus equus tuo altior est
"Let me eat when I'm hungry, let me drink when I'm dry.
Give me dollars when I'm hard up, religion when I die."
nowaysj wrote:I wholeheartedly believe that Michael Brown's mother and father killed him.
Well knowing how personal data is misused here in the UK as it is, I can imagine it's only a matter of time before the likes of a G4S or some other Gov endorsed security firm is selling your data to companies of interest because they have been monitoring your communications, sure it would be illegal but when has that stopped these people, the problem would be the lower level access...
I can just envision it...you lose a relative and receive condolences by the way of phone calls, emails and txt msg's from friends and family, hours later you are being hounded by life insurance companies asking if you would like to take out a policy.
Genevieve wrote:It's a universal law that the rich have to exploit the poor. Preferably violently.
I'm thinking differently on this.
If our reasonable actions are to be unhindered
we should freely & openly talk/write about them.
This of itself challenges surveillers to justify their intrusions.
And our unreasonable actions are better open to scrutiny.
In Pedro's example, the life insurance company knowing about your bereavement is not the problem,
its their unasked-for hectoring, which surveillance can detect and deflect.
People don't value privacy like they once did. They happily share every meal they eat and every shit they take on social media. Sites like twitter are the biggest government datamining operation ever to exist.
I always assumed the NSA was doing this, and not just for Verizon. This is just a time they happened to take a 'legal' route... I don't buy that they also didn't record voice calls for a second.
This is an interesting app called Redphone that encrypts voice calls. I use it when talking about ___ : http://www.whispersystems.org
(No I don't think they give a shit about me, but I still would rather not have private stuff in the open.)
Last edited by wormcode on Thu Jun 06, 2013 7:55 pm, edited 1 time in total.
magma wrote:as long as they're not snooping on content, I can't really see a huge invasion of privacy
This, don't give a shit. As if they'd ever be able to do that anyway you have any idea how much data that'd be?
Yeah but they tend to hold all of the data until a person becomes a 'person of interest' and then snoop retrospectively.
This is still not a problem until we take into account who decides who a 'person of interest' is, who the decider is accountable to and if they can be bought off by tabloid newspapers.
It's a slippery slope, or so the argument goes..
Don't know how many of you have seen this - relevant though
Last edited by Laszlo on Thu Jun 06, 2013 8:13 pm, edited 1 time in total.
I guess so yeah, but like, I just don't see it as threatening. And I defo don't think it's part of some large plan to watch us all. (it'd be fucking seriously shit)
The disclosure of a sweeping secret court order demanding Verizon turn over Americans’ phone records has come as a shock to some. But the revelation is no big deal, according to the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee—because it’s been happening for years.
The Guardian revealed Wednesday that a business subsidiary of Verizon had been ordered to hand over data to the National Security Agency showing all calls made and the duration of each call over a three-month period ending July 19. Rights groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, reacted to the news with outrage and called for an immediate end to the surveillance. But Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., attempted to play down the controversy over the snooping in a statement to reporters Thursday, describing it as merely a “three-month renewal of what has been the case for the past seven years.” The sweeping order has been in place since 2006, according to Feinstein, who is fully briefed on secret surveillance in her role on the Senate committee. “This is called protecting America," Feinstein added.
Feinstein’s statement is in line with what former employees for the NSA said in interviews on Thursday. Thomas Drake, a former senior NSA official who was prosecuted after alleging rampant waste, fraud, and abuse at the agency, said in an interview with Democracy Now that the mass grabbing of Verizon phone records was unsurprising:
This is routine, these are routine orders, this is nothing new. What’s new is we’re actually seeing an actual order and people are somehow surprised by it. The fact remains that this program has been in place for quite some time. It was actually started shortly after 9/11. The Patriot Act was the enabling mechanism that allowed the United States government in secret to acquire subscriber records from any company that exists in the United States.
William Binney, another former NSA employee, said during the same Democracy Now segment that he too thought the Verizon phone-records grab was part of a wider trend of sweeping NSA surveillance. Binney worked for the NSA for 32 years before resigning in 2001 over the issue of domestic surveillance and has since made a series of allegations about the agency’s spying capabilities. “If Verizon got one, so did everybody else,” Binney told Democracy Now, adding that he estimates roughly 280 million U.S. citizens are each in the NSA databases “several hundred to several thousand times.”
In a separate development Thursday, Attorney General Eric Holder appeared before the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee and was quizzed about the Verizon order. Holder looked uncomfortable answering questions about the scale of the surveillance and whether it had swept up the call records of some branches of government. The attorney general said he couldn’t answer specifics but agreed to attend a classified hearing to brief lawmakers. "I'd be more than glad to discuss this in an appropriate setting," he said.
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)
parson wrote:the way you cure disease with lsd is by manipulating the matrix with your mind
DRTY wrote:I guess so yeah, but like, I just don't see it as threatening. And I defo don't think it's part of some large plan to watch us all. (it'd be fucking seriously shit)
Maybe it's not a plan to watch us all. It probably isn't. Yet they got all this data about us and it can be used against us one day.
Even if we didn't do anything wrong, who says that it won't be wrong in the future? It's all very hypothetical I know, but that's how they tried to silence one of the whistleblowers; with all the data they had already collected about him.
It might all seem innocent right now but again, think of the risk. In the future it could well be the digital version of CCTV.
Last edited by NilsFG on Thu Jun 06, 2013 10:33 pm, edited 1 time in total.
lloydnoise wrote: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.
Also just to make clear, NSA is US so we are talking about American electronical communications, which doesn't mean ALL of the digital communications in the world.
It's still much but less than all.
you have any idea how much data that'd be?
