Political Forums - More on the NSA leaks.............

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Quote:

Originally Posted by finnbow (Post 160587)

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper is really struggling to explain why he told Congress in March that the National Security Agency does not intentionally collect any kind of data on millions of Americans...."I responded in what I thought was the most truthful, or least untruthful, manner by saying 'no,'" Clapper told NBC News on Sunday.

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/i...164742798.html

B-b-but, it's incidental!!!:D

A collection agency recently called me at work, to harrass me about a debt owed by a relative of mine. When I asked the woman how this debt had anything to do with me and how she got my work number in the first place, she hung up quick-like.

It seems the government is not the only entity capable of acquiring phone numbers.

Where is the outcry concerning private industry accessing your information?

Am I going to have to listen to that stupid, old argument that the constitution only protects us from the government but not each other?

Dave

Quote:

Originally Posted by finnbow (Post 160350)

As I said earlier, I was the project engineer on a number of NSA and INSCOM (the Army subsidiary of NSA) projects in Germany. At one facility, they used a gigantic antenna array (~1500 feet in diameter) to record and triangulate armed forces radio transmission from the Warsaw Pact countries. Their high speed computers would sort the transmissions for those containing key words. These were analyzed by "Language Experts," servicemen who took intensive language training at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey.

I knew several of the German language "experts" who would analyze stuff from the former East Germany. Their German language skills were, at best, at a Kindergarten level. Really. They could barely speak beyond the words necessary to order a beer in a Gasthaus. I suspect that it isn't much different for those at the NSA when it comes to the myriad dialects of Arabic, Pashtun, Farsi, etc.

Keep in mind that this type of listening was happening for decades all over the globe by NSA and combined with human intel from the CIA. They still didn't predict the fall of the Soviet Union or the Berlin Wall.

Back when I played with ham radio I recall seeing a bunch of ICOM R-7000 receivers for sale on ebay. The seller said they were from a government monitoring station. That was when analog cell phones were unencrypted in the 800 MHz band. Those ICOM radios could receive them.

It's easy to imagine that such spying has continued and probably grown, particularly with the internet.

Quote:

Originally Posted by ebacon (Post 160604)

It's also easy to imagine that the government, at any point in history, had spies about watching for signs of sedition/insurrection. I'd imagine every government does. Honestly, I'd regard any government that doesn't as being quite stupid and most likely not destined to survive for very long.

Dave

Quote:

Originally Posted by BlueStreak (Post 160618)

I think what scares me more about internet monitoring is that the signal/noise ratio is too low. It's a recipe for roid rage.

'least untruthful' LOL!

There should be an award for that kind of thing.

Pete

Let me think, I was in telecommunications for over 50 years and programmed my first computer in 1963. When Florence and I were courting - over a 500 mile separation - our phone calls could run an hour or more.

This made me think of a request we (our Bell group) had from the government for something similar. Now the largest disk drive we had at the time was the IBM 2311. I did some calculations and figured that since they wanted this data stored on-line we would have had 2311 drives strung from coast to coast.

They are storing which number gets overseas calls from other numbers, and even that is going to suck up a hell of a lot of space. There simply is not enough space for storing conversations

Quote:

Originally Posted by ebacon (Post 160620)

I think what scares me more about internet monitoring is that the signal/noise ratio is too low. It's a recipe for roid rage.

Thread bump.

What are each of us doing to make good of big data? I have more data from Facebook than I can digest. It's like overhearing couples fighting via cordless phones, but worse. At least with cordless phones I was hearing things that were happening around my house. Now I am hearing things that are happening around the nation.

All I know is that none of them are talking about art. Some of them are talking about architecture. Case in point regarding subdivisions.

When I moved to the country I was pissed off that a subdivision was being built nearby. That subdivision had a mass of mailboxes at its entrance. The US Postal Service could be efficient and only have to stop once to service that subdivision. We all want efficiency. Right?

Wrong. Sometimes we need human contact. We need to talk to the postal worker. We need to feel part of something bigger and more personable than post office boxes. We need to cry to someone and yell out loud, goddamnit I reached my corporate goal and this still is not what life is about! That is hard shit to overhear as a ham radio operator.

Case in point. When the subdivision went up next door I listened to a cordless phone conversation. A new homeowner was frustrated that she moved to the country but still did not have a mailbox on her house. She had to walk to the community mailbox area.

That subdivision, from a perspective of communication bandwidth, was a trailer park. None of us like trailer trash. Not tenants, not postal workers. How does big data prevent trailer trash? I'm not seeing it.