NSA Secretly Collecting Phone Records Of All U.S. Verizon Calls

[Xiahou]

Rand Paul said he wants to sue to stop the PRISM program in a class-action lawsuit.

I realize he's probably positioning himself for a presidential bid, but so what? If he's going to try to do something to reign in our government, I'm for it.

[a completely inoffensive name]

I'm willing to stand in the streets if people are willing to actually go the to the ballot box afterwards.

[HopAlongBunny]

It is a little disingenuous of politicians to get up in arms about a policy they were aware of, approved of and participated in to suddenly be outraged. Where was their outrage at the briefings? the vote on the Patriot Act?
There ought to be clowns...

[Xiahou]

It is a little disingenuous of politicians to get up in arms about a policy they were aware of, approved of and participated in to suddenly be outraged. Where was their outrage at the briefings? the vote on the Patriot Act?
There ought to be clowns...

In fairness, I believe Paul has been consistently against the Patriot Act...

[Lemur]

A really good essay that cuts to the core of why this is happening and how hard it will be to change:

Terrorism is basically a political communications strategy. The chief threat it poses is not to the lives of American citizens but to the direction of American policy and the electoral prospects of American politicians. A major strike in America by a jihadist terrorist group in 2012 would have done little damage to America, but it could have posed a serious problem for Barack Obama's re-election campaign. For the president the war on terror is what the Vietnam War was to Lyndon Johnson: a vast, tragic distraction in which he must be seen to be winning, lest the domestic agenda he really cares about (health-care, financial reform, climate-change mitigation, immigration reform, gun control, inequality) be derailed. It's no surprise that he has given the surveillance state whatever it says it needs to prevent a major terrorist attack. [...]

[W]e're not likely to get calmer about terrorism, because too many people are trying to keep us frantic. At least three parties stand to gain from exaggerating, rather than minimising, our reactions to terrorist strikes. The first is the media, which wins viewership by whipping up anxiety over terrorist strikes. The second is politicians seeking partisan advantage, since panic over foreign-backed terrorism tends to increase voter turnout. (In Israel terrorism shifts voter support to the right. In America throughout the early 2000s, anxiety over terrorism increased support for president George W. Bush, but by 2008 an attack would have increased support for Mr Obama. Similarly, Spanish voters punished the conservative government for the Madrid train bombings in 2004 because 80% of the public had opposed the government's participation in the invasion of Iraq. Either way, when terrorists attack, one party or the other is going to make political hay out of it.)

Finally, the third party trying to exacerbate our responses to terrorist attacks are the terrorists themselves, who have generally proven quite effective at choosing targets that provoke widespread media coverage. As hard as we may try to restrain our national responses to terrorism, there will be some pretty smart terrorists out there figuring out how to do things that get our attention again. Even the rather inept Tsarnaev brothers, who only managed to kill three people, did an excellent job of picking a target that dominated the news cycle. Had that attack occurred in mid-2012, it would have completely derailed the presidential campaign. Democrats would no doubt have tried fruitlessly to tamp down public reaction, while Republicans would have allied with the media in hyping it relentlessly.

Politicians do not want to have to deal with these sorts of surprises. They have very strong incentives to go along with intelligence organisations that say they need ever-more-powerful surveillance programmes to see what the terrorists are up to. For Mr Obama, this is a no-win situation. The only thing worse than missing a terrorist attack because an NSA surveillance programme had been blocked would be having the NSA leak that the terrorist attack was missed because you blocked their surveillance programme. Now, having given the NSA what it said it needed to prevent any nasty surprises, he finds himself dealing with a different nasty surprise: the leak of the NSA programmes themselves.

[Shaka_Khan]

We talk about ..............................

Something is going to trigger some sort of algorithm. If not, then they ain't doing their job right.

For those words, we should've used Shogun, Halal Spring, Persia, Babylonia, Khorasan, White Whale I, White Whale II, shortly after the start of the academic year in the Northern Hemisphere, barley, Bastan Bambings, silent robes and the bird thread respectively.

[Papewaio]

These programs and their predecessors have existed for some time. Carnivore for instance has been publically acknowledged since 1997. This situation is not the cause of a single President nor is it just the responsibility of the President for this situation. There are three parts to government, I'm pretty sure there is an intelligence committee within Congress who have a higher day to day responsibility with this. There is also a Supreme Court who have from an external laymans point of view failed in protecting Consitutional rights. Justice needs to be seen and done at a decent pace.

At least as a foreigner I know my emails will get read by the powers that be in government. I suppose that makes me better connected then most US citizens without a lobby group. Us dirty foreigners, us sub humans who cannot be trusted. Just remember that every diplomatic relationship is reciprocated. So China and Russia now are allowed to read every US email, VoIP call, screenshot, personal SMS etc because to them these are foreigners and they can't be trusted.

I do wonder if the trigger point is the email or other correspondence having gone overseas. Given that most routing is best effort and can go quite a few alternative routs it is possible for an email to a person sitting in the same city to have the email go around the country or even the world.

So all it would take is an enterprising agency to setup a POP outside the US. Then if they want to read a particular persons communications they do the following:
Wrap the traffic in a WAN protocol that will always go to the outside POP.
That point of presence being out of country makes the traffic to be communicating with a foreign entity therefore it can all be read by the letter of the law.

You might be able to figure out any weird routing by either its consistency or latency. Unfortunately you'd probably need the very metadata the NSA is using.

[Beskar]

I had an opportunity to work for GCHQ a couple years back, which dealt with analysing Internet content. However, the placement was in Portsmouth at a military installation and it wasn't that well paid (entry level), so the finances of the situation deterred me.

I could have probably worked on this data if I took that job.

[ICantSpellDawg]

A really good essay that cuts to the core of why this is happening and how hard it will be to change:

Good article. Nuclear terrorism is the only type that we should be overly concerned with.
The point of the article is spot on and the civil rights impact of the surveillance culture that exists and is growing vastly outweighs the benefits of the programs themselves. The war on terror is now a greater threat to the lives and well-being of the American populace than terrorism ever was.

Start hammering every Federal legislator you can in any way you can; mail, phone, email, facebook, sky-writing. For them to call Snowden an oath-breaking traitor and ignore their own broken oath to defend the Constitution is worthy of contempt. Send them messages using every medium.

[Strike For The South]

Something is strange.

This guy doesn't scream "high level intelligence"

Don't get me wrong, The USA is a hollowed shell of the republic we claim to be. However, this guy doesn't sit right with me.

[Fragony]

At least I get to say Obama knows me at parties. And a big fat LOL at the Dutch leftist church who knew, for a fact, that there was change they could believe in. So sure but wrong as usual, and naturally united in silence when, once again, wrong. When will leftist 'intellectuals' understand that they simply don't get it? No there is no arab spring, no Obama isn't.... him

I am hesitating between Dronebama and oBBama, which is better

[Greyblades]

What are you wittering on about this time?

[Fragony]

What are you wittering on about this time?

Well the leftist church being Obamamaniacs and wrong as usual, it's right up there ^

[Papewaio]

Except this kind of spying has been happening before 9/11.

All that's happened is they've updated the scope of apps with the upgrade in aps available.

If you use TCP or UDP or SFTP they are listening. It's a continous tap on your communications which somehow has been allowed even when wire taps aren't. Why? because the protocols that make networking so easy to implement make it so easy for the holders to the keys of the infrastructure so easy to tap.

It's like an arguement for piracy in reverse. The authorities find it so easy to implement that it just too difficult to go through due process in comparison with how technically easy it is. So rather then keep the same liberties and safe guards, the authorities change the laws to make continous taps legal.

Most laws should be made to think about what they would do in he hands of a despot.

The threshold is no longer mass mudering terror cells. The threshold is journalists examining the government for corruption. If the watchers and whistle blowers are being tapped wih such an easy shrug of the shoulders who next?

[Lemur]

No there is no arab spring, no Obama isn't.... him

Well the leftist church being Obamamaniacs and wrong as usual, it's right up there ^

Not really sure how you can look at the facts, the history, the forces at work (esp. large-scale private data mining), and conclude that this is all about Obama. There are three branches of US government, all of which are equally culpable in the building of the surveillance state. Indiscriminate electronic eavesdropping dates back to at least 1997, when Carnivore was leaked. None of this lets the current admin off the hook, or excuses their behavior, but to read this with any thoughtfulness at all and conclude, "DAMN YOU OBAMA!" strikes me as radical reductionism.

If Obama vanished tomorrow, abducted by aliens, never to be seen again, this problem would not go away. In fact, if Obama were to decide today that he wants to change all of this and dismantle the broad eavesdropping programs, I can assure you he would not be able to accomplish his goal. No more than he has been able to close Guantanamo.

So why don't you take that 32-ounce Big Gulp of Obama Derangement Syndrome, put it down for a minute, and actually read up on this subject? And consider how we got to this point, and what steps might begin to move us away from Total Information Awareness?

[Fragony]

Not really sure how you can look at the facts, the history, the forces at work (esp. large-scale private data mining), and conclude that this is all about Obama. There are three branches of US government, all of which are equally culpable in the building of the surveillance state. Indiscriminate electronic eavesdropping dates back to at least 1997, when Carnivore was leaked. None of this lets the current admin off the hook, or excuses their behavior, but to read this with any thoughtfulness at all and conclude, "DAMN YOU OBAMA!" strikes me as radical reductionism.

If Obama vanished tomorrow, abducted by aliens, never to be seen again, this problem would not go away. In fact, if Obama were to decide today that he wants to change all of this and dismantle the broad eavesdropping programs, I can assure you he would not be able to accomplish his goal. No more than he has been able to close Guantanamo.

So why don't you take that 32-ounce Big Gulp of Obama Derangement Syndrome, put it down for a minute, and actually read up on this subject? And consider how we got to this point, and what steps might begin to move us away from Total Information Awareness?

Sorry I wasn't talking about American politics, I was just mocking the Dutch self-proclaimed intellectuals who appeared to be on better xtc than I ever had when Obama was elected. Not just in the Netherlands, take the nobleprice for peace he got in Norway. Scuzi for finding it a bit amusing and laughing them in the face, beliebers with a phd lol

[Lemur]

An interesting counter re big data mining. Pretty sure I don't agree, but it's one of the less-stupid counter-arguments I've read.

I am hoping people aren’t making the same mistake about PRISM that I once made about Gmail. When Gmail first came out, I was working in the California legislature, and a co-worker and I thought it was a terrible idea for Google to, in effect, “read” everyone’s mail and provide ads targeted to them. Our boss introduced a bill to prohibit Google from doing this.

I was assigned to defend the bill at a tech conference, and let’s say I had some misconceptions firmly and uniformly corrected.

No one at Google reads (or could read) anyone’s email. That would be (a) impossible, given the volume of email, and (b) a pretty stupid thing for a company to try to do. Google has pretty sophisticated algorithms that can scan millions of texts for words and phrases that advertisers believe would be relevant to a particular commercial purpose. Ads matching those terms are posted next to the email, and no human (except the recipient) has ever seen anything.
I’m not sure if any actual humans ever see any Facebook postings, but my guess is that the first pass of PRISM works like Gmail. Someone has developed algorithms for potentially dangerous words and phrases, and the millions or billions of Facebook posts are scanned for those. The algorithm’s bar would have to be fairly high, since the number of posts would be astronomical, I would imagine.

Posts that make it over the bar (still not having been viewed by any human being) would then be collected into some output that IS more closely examined, and this may be the stage where humans might be involved. Again, I don’t have any special knowledge here, but I honestly can’t imagine how this could work any other way. The only things that are ever actually seen by human eyes are those that have some markers of potential serious threats.

I can see how some people might still find little comfort in that, and I’m sure there would have to be many false positives in a system like this. But I think it’s far more consistent with your intuition about why this isn’t such a horrible invasion of privacy – an intuition that it seems a lot of us share.

That difference between technological review of data and human eyes viewing (and possibly abusing) communication is an important distinction. If PRISM is more like Gmail than like J. Edgar Hoover’s private FBI files, then this has less to do with privacy than some people might fear.

[Lemur]

True story: Two members of my family have been in the US intelligence business. One of them told me in that all overseas calls were monitored with word-recognition software. (This was 1990, so pretty Sci Fi stuff at the time.)

I lived in Madrid in the early 1990s, back when calling home was a big and expensive thing. (Yes, phone calls used to cost a lot of money, it was an old timey problem.)

Every time I called the states I would begin my conversations with a few random words, such as "thermonuclear device" and "dead drop," just for funsies. Over half of my (expensive) calls were cut off without warning.

I did this purely to amuse myself.

-edit-

Also, very depressing poll shows why large-scale surveillance is gonna be very hard to contain: Most of our fellow citizens are totally cool with it. Gah.

[Tellos Athenaios]

An interesting counter re big data mining. Pretty sure I don't agree, but it's one of the less-stupid counter-arguments I've read.

He's moved on from one specific set of mistakes to another. Although I find his assertion that no human ever sees any facebook posts positively plausible by comparison.

[Papewaio]

BTW the reason some foreigners are very worried is because they are part of the five eyes alliance. Which means their countries share intelligence.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/UKUSA_Agreement

That's UK, US, Australia, Canada and New Zealand.

I wonder where all the Stazi went when the Berlin Wall fell...

[Husar]

An interesting counter re big data mining. Pretty sure I don't agree, but it's one of the less-stupid counter-arguments I've read.

There's nothing new in that, but he leaves out that humans can simply change the keywords the machines are looking for and get results on different people that way. Just add "marihuana" or something similar to the words it's looking for and mail the results to local police departments on a daily basis. It's just a little extension to bring down crime rates and increase everyone's safety after all.

And where can I vote against this if I don't want it?

[Sasaki Kojiro]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?featur...n9fu-rM#t=318s

Watch up to 6:04 and then click here

[Strike For The South]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?featur...n9fu-rM#t=318s

Watch up to 6:04 and then click here

See this is the problem with this whole story, I can't tell whether your being pithy or serious.

I hope its pith, the internet has already been flooded with that.

[Sasaki Kojiro]

See this is the problem with this whole story, I can't tell whether your being pithy or serious.

I hope its pith, the internet has already been flooded with that.

If you think he's some kind of conspiracy nut then obviously you haven't seen enough movies. I recommend this one, it's basically a documentary.

[Strike For The South]

KEEP HIM ON A LITTLE LONGER

[Beskar]

If you think he's some kind of conspiracy nut then obviously you haven't seen enough movies. I recommend this one, it's basically a documentary.

I remember watching that and when this first broke out, I was thinking about this movie. Though, I guess knowing the Government was 'spying' wasn't groundbreaking. I would be more surprised if they didn't at all.

[ICantSpellDawg]

Also, very depressing poll shows why large-scale surveillance is gonna be very hard to contain: Most of our fellow citizens are totally cool with it. Gah.

The older generations who have been sheep to the slaughter will eventually die off, hopefully before ruining the entire earth for the rest of humanity. Anyone who has ever lost a job due to marijuana/drug consumption or has had someone tell them not to post photos of lawful activity on their private Facebook pages will recognize how petty government will be if we let it and ruinous to you if you make an error. I see the world changing before our eyes. 8 months ago, the idea that 100k people would pile up and go to battle with the AK party in Istanbul would not have sounded like a thing. Then it happened and it is going to spread and get worse and reasonable people from different religious, political, and cultural backgrounds are going to support it all over the world.

[Xiahou]

An interesting counter re big data mining. Pretty sure I don't agree, but it's one of the less-stupid counter-arguments I've read.

I think it's plenty stupid. Obviously, there aren't millions of NSA agents reading everyone's mundane emails- they search them for keywords.... duh.

As long as their only keying on terrorism-type keywords, it really isn't a big deal. So, how do we know what keywords they're searching on?? We have no way of knowing. They have access to everything, and the government's response is basically "you can trust us not to abuse it". If anyone is gullible enough to accept that, I have some bridges to sell you.

[HopAlongBunny]

Apparently the EU is not amused. At least they are asking questions which make some basic sense.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-22872884

[ICantSpellDawg]

Since it is so important for people to know what the majority of knuckle dragging buffoons who can't figure out how to use a credit card thing about intricate issues, here are 2 polls that dispute the pew findings and now show a majority of people are against this nonsense. Or it could show that the wind has blown and people have run to grab a beer in between the football game or Kim Kardashian show long enough to even know what day it is.