More on the NSA leaks.............
 

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/...&dlvrit=992637

Comments?

Dave

I posted about the news thing I had seen years ago. It was this Room 641A http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A

So anyway, I gave up the idea that I or anybody else would ever have any real privacy if one used anything like a phone, computer, anything at all actually.
They have things on light poles that listen for bullets nowadays, surveillance cameras on main street, and now spy drones and you can even buy your own to spy on your neighbors.

Maybe I should get me one of them anonymous semi automatic assault rifles to shoot them down with. :rolleyes:


Carl

Obama promised transparency. Now all of our lives are. A campaign promise kept? :rolleyes:

Our Freedom of Information Act, nothing like telling our enemies exactly what we do to track them down.

Meanwhile if you use a search engine it keeps a history of all the sites you visit, supposedly to assist you - yeah sure.

And all the feigned outrages continues.

You can buy a spy drone at Walmart. Not as sophisticated as the ones the military uses, but, they do work................

My take on the whole NSA thing is this;

My guess is they are gathering so much information that 99.99999999999999% is noise that gets them nowhere. In fact, they are probably buried under it so deep that it is useless to them. They gather it faster than they can sort it.

Here we sit, nearly every day, talking trash about the government. I'm thinking if my government was really all that worried about anything I have to say that I'd be sitting in the gulag already.

Dave

in 2001?
Congress voted to go to war as Bush & Co. giving him power to do all sorts of war power things like invading 2 countries with no checks and balances, no bid MIC contracts, national security is another part and the list goes on.

So what should Obama do? Let Mr wikileaks dictate our national security and make Rupert put everything on the front page of his New York Post?

I think Obama is doing a fine job and at this point I do not think he can trust the GOP to do the right thing. He keeps extending a hand to them and they kick sand in his face then go on Fox News and say Obama won't work with them. It has been party before country like this since day one.
Not risking national security change at this time works for me.

Maybe if we minded our own business and concentrated on our own people and our own borders maybe this crap can just be laid to rest once a generation grown up without this mindset. We sure ain't going to change it with a flip of a switch.



Carl

We just need a little cyber-disobedience.
"Occupy NSA" if you will.

Privacy...ha!

As someone else pointed out, ever live in a small town. Ever been where sitting on the porch or in your easy chair with the police scanner running is nightly entertainment.....

Privacy indeed........

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.

Dude, they gather all of this "data", then bad stuff happens anyways. This tells me that they're unable to do much with it. Everybody is reacting like President Obama is personally digging around in each and every credit record, financial statement and phone conversation looking for something to screw each and all of us with.........

Really? That's billions of documents and conversations on a daily basis. Who in the heck has time for that and what would be the point anyways?

Call me crazy, but I think they're casting the net for the big fish. I don't think they're worried about what BlueStreak and Wasillaguy are bitching about this afternoon.

Dave

Anything avoid resolving the budget before the next election, even better if you can keep the partisan scandals going as well. The others seem to be deflating somewhat, especially Benghazi.
Yep and the good ole sequester, borrow against the future to keep the airports clear and then hide that under the sequester all federal funding for oil and nuke spill cleanup has gone away even though the spills and leaks haven't. That is where thousands of these layoffs are.
Yep, more important to discuss the loss of privacy that occurred many years ago. :rolleyes:


Carl

What all about the gossiping about all the townfolk? :p


Carl

Anyone who thinks that the alphabet soup isn't collecting any and all data going out on the net and the waves? has shit fer brains. Can they actually make much sense of it all, unlikely.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinio...459_story.html

Surprise, surprise! This old southpaw tends to agree with this opinion.^

Frankly you all have more to worry about from Google, Facebook et. al,

It's easier to sift than in Orwells' day, they can use algorithms instead of reading each one.

Pete

When I had a listed Xfinity phone I was getting calls from some yahoo in Nigeria (I think) telling me I had won 2 million and a Mercedes. In a lottery I had not entered BTW. Every time I put his number on the non acceptance list he called from a different number. Now if some half assed con man can pull off that stunt ,,,,

"Overall, 56 percent of Americans consider the NSA accessing telephone call records of millions of Americans through secret court orders “acceptable,” while 41 percent call the practice “unacceptable.” "WaPo/Pew Research poll.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politi...y.html?hpid=z1

To be honest, I think Snowden needs a time out handed to him. Too bad Camp Leavenworth is reserved for military folk.;) Need I post up pics of people jumping from the WTC towers?

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

More from WaPo/Pew poll...:rolleyes:

"But with a Democratic president at the helm instead of a Republican, partisan views have turned around significantly.
Sixty-nine percent of Democrats say terrorism investigations, not privacy, should be the government’s main concern, an 18-percentage-point jump from early January 2006, when the NSA activity under the George W. Bush administration was first reported. Compared with that time, Republicans’ focus on privacy has increased 22 points.
The reversal on the NSA’s practices is even more dramatic. In early 2006, 37 percent of Democrats found the agency’s activities acceptable; now nearly twice that number — 64 percent — say the use of telephone records is okay. By contrast, Republicans slumped from 75 percent acceptable to 52 percent today."

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

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.

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

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

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.