You know it doesn't matter if anyone ever looked at metadata or content

[hootinholler]

The fact remains that it was collected and stored for future reference. The government spent millions, hundreds of millions, possibly billions to collect and store it.

That is the very definition of an unreasonable search. It destroys the ephemeral nature of conversation and normal human interaction.

But they aren't just storing it. They are using it. They are spending even more millions to sanitize the intelligence so it can be fed to the DEA. The only reason to do that is that otherwise the intelligence would be thrown out at trial because it was obtained illegally.

Yet, still as ever here on the old DU, we have the pom-pom brigade throwing sand in the air hoping that no one will see what is going on. The thinking few that do see what's going on and say something get labeled some form or other of a poopy-headed dolt.

Yay Team!

[Octafish]

1. Imagine what they'll be able to do when they upgrade the mining tools?

They're not building data mountain for nothing. Who knows? They might be able to tell who is thinking up a crime just by their word selection or browsing history. It sure would make it easy to see who doesn't think Smirko McCokespoon was elected in 2000 and get them out of the way for Jebthro in 2016.

[hootinholler]

2. That Utah facility has to be half a billion on its own

You're spot on that these sorts of things don't get built without purpose.

As to Jebthro, IDK. I don't think the population has the capacity to go there. Especially if we can get people like Warren and Dean to inject their messages into the presidential process.

I still have to wonder if the DEA is getting preferential treatment in exchange for not stepping all over the CIA's operations.

[questionseverything]

28. k&r

the "haystack" is illegal,,,that is a point that gets missed sometimes and i am glad you brought it out

[Octafish]

29. Big Love Meets Big Brother

The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say)

By James Bamford
Wired, March 15, 2012

The spring air in the small, sand-dusted town has a soft haze to it, and clumps of green-gray sagebrush rustle in the breeze. Bluffdale sits in a bowl-shaped valley in the shadow of Utah’s Wasatch Range to the east and the Oquirrh Mountains to the west. It’s the heart of Mormon country, where religious pioneers first arrived more than 160 years ago. They came to escape the rest of the world, to understand the mysterious words sent down from their god as revealed on buried golden plates, and to practice what has become known as “the principle,” marriage to multiple wives.

Today Bluffdale is home to one of the nation’s largest sects of polygamists, the Apostolic United Brethren, with upwards of 9,000 members. The brethren’s complex includes a chapel, a school, a sports field, and an archive. Membership has doubled since 1978—and the number of plural marriages has tripled—so the sect has recently been looking for ways to purchase more land and expand throughout the town.

But new pioneers have quietly begun moving into the area, secretive outsiders who say little and keep to themselves. Like the pious polygamists, they are focused on deciphering cryptic messages that only they have the power to understand. Just off Beef Hollow Road, less than a mile from brethren headquarters, thousands of hard-hatted construction workers in sweat-soaked T-shirts are laying the groundwork for the newcomers’ own temple and archive, a massive complex so large that it necessitated expanding the town’s boundaries. Once built, it will be more than five times the size of the US Capitol.

Rather than Bibles, prophets, and worshippers, this temple will be filled with servers, computer intelligence experts, and armed guards. And instead of listening for words flowing down from heaven, these newcomers will be secretly capturing, storing, and analyzing vast quantities of words and images hurtling through the world’s telecommunications networks. In the little town of Bluffdale, Big Love and Big Brother have become uneasy neighbors.

CONTINUED...

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/all/1

PS: I also find it hard to conceive pretzeldent Jebthro, but having gotten so old has one advantage: I've seen this picture before and the game is rigged for that outcome.

[hootinholler]

31. A couple of $Billion, eh?

For that we get to be suspects.

Under construction by contractors with top-secret clearances, the blandly named Utah Data Center is being built for the National Security Agency. A project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks. The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013. Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital “pocket litter.” It is, in some measure, the realization of the “total information awareness” program created during the first term of the Bush administration—an effort that was killed by Congress in 2003 after it caused an outcry over its potential for invading Americans’ privacy.

But “this is more than just a data center,” says one senior intelligence official who until recently was involved with the program. The mammoth Bluffdale center will have another important and far more secret role that until now has gone unrevealed. It is also critical, he says, for breaking codes. And code-breaking is crucial, because much of the data that the center will handle—financial information, stock transactions, business deals, foreign military and diplomatic secrets, legal documents, confidential personal communications—will be heavily encrypted. According to another top official also involved with the program, the NSA made an enormous breakthrough several years ago in its ability to cryptanalyze, or break, unfathomably complex encryption systems employed by not only governments around the world but also many average computer users in the US. The upshot, according to this official: “Everybody’s a target; everybody with communication is a target.”

Thanks for that link, I hadn't seen that article.

[Octafish]

41. Money well spent.

Bamford is the bomb, er, a great writer.

The former NSA official held his thumb and forefinger close together: “We are that far from a turnkey totalitarian state.”

Gen. Clapper is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I've ever known in my life.

[hootinholler]

44. Seems like the question is how far from the lock is the key? n/t

[Octafish]

47. Unlike the silo or submarine movies, the thing probably doesn't require two people.

While I'm not talking a committee, it'd be nice to know their names and titles.

[Octafish]

42. A Doomed System: Snowden and the Stupidity of the Security State

Find the most interesting things on the Intertub:

A Doomed System

Snowden and the Stupidity of the Security State

by KEVIN CARSON
CounterPunch, AUGUST 12, 2013

Back in 2006 Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom, in The Starfish and the Spider, contrasted the way networks and hierarchies respond to outside attacks. Networks, when attacked, become even more decentralized and resilient. A good example is Napster and its successors, each of which has more closely approached an ideal peer-to-peer model, and further freed itself from reliance on infrastructure that can be shut down by central authority, than its predecessors. Hierarchies, on the other hand, respond to attack by becoming even more ossified, brittle and closed. Hierarchies respond to leaks by becoming internally opaque and closed even to themselves, so that their information is compartmentalized and they are less able to make effective use of the knowledge dispersed among their members.

We can see this in the way the national security state has responded to leaks, first by US Army PFC Bradley Manning and now by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. Hugh Gusterton, in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (“Not All Secrets are Alike,” July 23), notes that the government is taking measures to avoid future such leaks by “segmenting access to information so that individual analysts cannot avail themselves of so much, and by giving fewer security clearances, especially to employees of contractors.”

This approach is doomed. “Segmentation of access runs counter to the whole point of the latest intelligence strategy, which is fusion of data from disparate sources. The more Balkanized the data, the less effective the intelligence. And … intelligence agencies are collecting so much information that they have to hire vast numbers of new employees, many of whom cannot be adequately vetted.”

SNIP...

Further, as an anonymous former EFF intern notes, even idealistic young people who believe in the NSA’s mission find themselves paralyzed by the increasingly adversarial atmosphere, afraid even to type code into a terminal for fear of learning after the fact that they violated one of the CFAA’s vague, Kafkaesque provisions.

SNIP...

The very people the security state is most interested in monitoring — ranging from genuine terrorists to domestic dissidents like Snowden and the occupy movement — respond to every increase in surveillance by making themselves more opaque to the government. The Snowden scandal resulted in a spike in adoption of measures like PGP encryption and TOR browsing. Even as the NSA is hoovering up more and more hay, more and more needles quietly remove themselves from the haystack.

CONTINUED...

http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/08/12/snowden-and-the-stupidity-of-the-security-state/

Signal to noise ratio of stupidity is something else.

[OnyxCollie]

3. Here's a very informative lecture from Shane Harris about data collection.

Who's Watching You Now?
http://www.edmaysproductions.net/webvideo/harris.wmv

[marble falls]

4. Right on. It doesn't matter if the can't use the stuff they dig up, it only matters they should not

have done in the first place,

[Boom Sound 416]

5. It's about intimidation

[damnedifIknow]

6. I look at things differently now such as Facebook

my Yahoo mail account and Google. I feel prying eyes upon me.

[MotherPetrie]

7. K&R. It's beyond disturbing to see attempts to justify the same Dem admin. activity that

would get a Repug admin. CRUCIFIED here.

[Maedhros]

9. As always, the Simpsons has the answer:

[cherokeeprogressive]

8. Yeah but... Matt Damon! n/t

[hootinholler]

10. The NSA is still pissed over Good Will Hunting?

[cstanleytech]

11. Storing it isnt an issue imo as the phone companies already do store the data

themselves this just lets the government correlate the data to try and find links from people overseas that they know are terrorists who might be trying to communicate with others so that we hopefully can avoid another 9/11, you know kinda the thing we all complained Bush failed to.
Mind you the program should have in place better oversight as well as maybe another branch of the government should be the ones running the program such as the judicial branch but the point is its not fair to expect the government to do the job of catching and stopping these people without providing the tools they need to do so and personally if I had to choose funding this or armed drones I would choose this over the armed drones.

[Th1onein]

12. It will BE an issue when you piss off someone and they come after your ass.

All they have to do is search that content and build a nice case against you. And remember: THEY have the content, so if there is exculpatory evidence in it, YOU won't get it.

[cstanleytech]

13. They wont be coming after me nor you but like I said more oversight to prevent abuse

I fully support because lets face it without such a thing the government would probably be tempted to do what you outlined there eventually.

[Th1onein]

15. Those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it........and, my favorite:

“First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out—
because I was not a communist;
Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—
because I was not a socialist;
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
because I was not a trade unionist;
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
because I was not a Jew;
Then they came for me—
and there was no one left to speak out for me.”

― Martin Niemöller

[cstanleytech]

18. See #17

Yes I know I posted it somewhat after yours but I didnt see yours at the time as I was busy writing my own post so it did not refresh until i hit submit.

[christx30]

16. Power will ALWAYS be abused. It doesn't matter who is in the White House.

That's why I am in favor of severely limiting power. I want to stop the collection of metadata. I want to close down and sell off the crap they are building in Utah. I want so much oversight into their activities it renders those activities mostly useless. I want so many leaks coming out of there, reporters are saying "On March 15th, 2013, Agent Jones sneezed at 10:43am." I don't want those people to be able to trust the agent sitting next to them. Only then will we be back to actually having a 4th amendment that means something.
Save the collection of data and wiretaps for the people actually named in warrants.

[cstanleytech]

21. Correction

" Power will ALWAYS be abused." Should be " Power can be abused" and I fully agree that it can be abused as we have all seen but you better get ready to buy burial caskets wholesale because if we deny the government the tools to get the job down to track and stop groups like Bin Ladens from carrying out future attacks we are going to probably need those caskets.

[christx30]

27. Hell...

You want to remove all threat of an attack by taking away everyone's freedom and privacy. We could do round-the-clock searches of every home in the US and arrest people at random. No one would be able do anything unseemly ever. Could stop drugs and premarital sex and all types of crimes and social ills.

Or you could restore the Constitution to what it once was and face a little risk.
Handle terrorism as a law enforcement problem and not one that requires a police state.

[cstanleytech]

35. Negative.

I want the government to have reasonable tools to do the job properly.
As it is the database of phone records is a reasonable tool for trying to catch these groups though its true in its current form it could be abused which is why I am advocating moving it from the NSA to under the control of the judicial branch so they can act as firewall between the information and the government to make sure peoples rights arent violated which is really the judicial branches responsibility anyway.

[Ms. Toad]

14. You're not paying attention

if that is all you believe they are doing.

A computer is scanning all of the e-mail correspondence which crosses the US border.
If certain names or words come up, the e-mail is copied without a warrant.
The copy of the e-mail is then sent to a human team for analysis (still without a warrant), merely because the e-mail includes certain key words.

(Per the New York Times article in the last 2 days)

And no, I don't recall blaming Bush for not stopping 9-11.

And countries which forfeit freedom in the name of safety have neither.

[cstanleytech]

17. Well since you like quoting other people here is one in return

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

In other words we cannot ignore the fact that their groups like Bin Ladens in this world, they exist and they clearly "are" a threat unless you think 9/11 was a one time thing so the government does in fact need the tools to track them and to try and stop them.
I grant you I share your concerns about the access of the data though which is why I support moving the database from the control of the NSA to that of the Judicial branch.
That way they can hopefully make sure that the government doesnt get out of control and misuse the information for any purpose except to track and stop such groups like Bin Ladens and that the database is not used for something like catching someone who likes to share torrents.

[Th1onein]

20. LOL! Are you REALLY trying to play the terra terra terra card here?

Good grief, give it up already.

They don't have the right to spy on me, okay? Or you. We are supposed to be protected from unreasonable search and seizure by the Fourth Amendment. Remember the Fourth Amendment?

Bin Laden, Boogie Man, Freddie Kruger, we are protected by the Fourth Amendment. PERIOD.

STOP THE SPYING.

[cstanleytech]

22. They arent, like I said the data from thephones is

already in the hands of the phone companies this just makes it a bit easier to detect hidden cells that are communicating.
I will grant you that the email reading is a concern and I am not sure why they are doing that because if they are communicating via email you would think they would be encrypting them and without the decryption key I question what good that part will do.

[Th1onein]

26. Then they are PIRATING my data.

Sorry, that argument doesn't fly. I give permission for the cell companies to have my data, when I sign a fucking contract with them, to do business with them. I signed no such contract with the government. And, besides that, they are the government. They have to have search warrants. Got it?

Plus, they are collecting and storing CONTENT. It's NONE of their fucking business unless a judge says it should be. NOT a FISA judge or court, which apparently is just rubber stamping domestic spying en masse, but individually, with SPECIFIC things to be looking for, instead of fishing expeditions.

I can't believe you're still making these stupid, and ignorant, arguments.

[Ms. Toad]

23. Terrorists have always been around

and will continue to be around. No matter how many of our freedoms we forfeit, all we will gain is that our government will become what we say we are fighting against.

It is not just access to the data which concerns me. It is gathering it in the first place. Permitting unfettered information gathering, without due process - or even the right to review the constitutionality of the information gathering after the fact means we have lost all we are seeking to protect. The secrecy and deliberate end run around due process has to end. That is the only way to prevent it from becoming abused by the next Bush, or equivalent, who is elected. We should not trust anything to President Obama that we do not trust in the hands of the likes of Bush, because the protection of our freedom should not depend on how much we trust the person in whose hands it rests.

[Egnever]

32. homophobes have always been around

no point in making laws to try to prevent it....

[hootinholler]

33. Prevent what?

Homophobia? What sort of law could possibly correct a mental deficiency?

And no hate crimes laws do not make being homophobic illegal, they make acting on it illegal.

[Egnever]

34. LOL

[Ms. Toad]

36. Seriously?

There's a huge difference between violating my civil rights by searching my e-mail without a warrant or any articulable suspicion that I have done anything wrong in order to prevent some third party from carrying out a terror attack (or prosecute them after the fact) - which, according to the the New York Times article a couple of days ago IS being done.

And making terrorism against the law.

One is constitutional - the other is not. But you knew that.

If you want to combat terrorism by making a law to prohibit me from carrying out terrorist attacks - have at it. Just don't pretend that the state indiscriminately searching every e-mail which crosses the border is the same as making it illegal to carry out out homophobic acts.

(On the other hand - if you are trying to make homophobic speech, as opposed to acts, against the law then you do run into constitutional issues with the first amendment.)

[Egnever]

38. Exactly my reaction when I read your post

Funny how that works.

You seem to be convinced what they are doing is unconstitutional. Yet I have yet to see any court declare it to be so in fact just the opposite, every court decision I have seen so far has held they are acting completely within the scope of the law. Perhaps you have seen a decision I havent.

So they did make laws and they are using them. The fact that you dont like what the laws allow them to do does not make them unconstitutional. They may be, I am not a legal scholar nor a judge but as of yet they have not been found to be so to my knowledge. Feel free to correct me if you have seen such a decision.

I am quite sure there will be challenges going forward and I am quite interested to see how the courts rule. Untill they do you can not just declare it unconstitutional. Given the courts past rulings on the subject I suspect you will be quite disappointed in their findings.

I also think there is a difference between the ability to read your emails and actually reading them when you are suspected of a link to terrorists.

Your post I responded to tried to suggest that since there have always been terrorists we should do nothing which I found incredibly stupid. So I posted something equally stupid in response. Probably not the best approach but..

[Ms. Toad]

40. I do happen to be a legal scholar.

There has not been a case declaring it unconstitutional, but an unconstitutional law does not miraculously become unconstitutional merely because a court (finally) declares it so. It has been unconstitutional from the day it is written (assuming it is unconstitutional as written, rather than as applied).

DOMA is a prime example. If the law only became unconstitutional when the Supreme Court decided the case, it would have done Edie Windsor no good because (according to your theory) it was perfectly unconstitutional up until the moment the Supreme Court arrived at its decision. The practical consequences of declaring a law unconstitutional often take a while to work out - but for the most part when a law is tested as written (as opposed to as applied), the law becomes void ab initio (a fancy way of saying it never existed because it was unconstitutional from day one). A more specific example was when I worked at the court of appeals - the legislature violated what is known as the one subject rule. It is unconstitutional in some states to have a kitchen sink law (i.e. one which includes everything but the kitchen sink). The law had been in effect for a number of years before the state supreme court declared it unconstitutional. That meant (among other things) that every person sentenced from the day it passed was entitled to have their sentence reviewed because the law under which they were sentenced was unconstitutional at the time the sentence was imposed (not just years later when the declaration about its unconstitutionality was made).

So this insistence that if there is not a decision, the law must be constitutional comes from a fundamental misunderstanding about what it means for a law to be unconstitutional.

The only significant test case so far was thrown out (around the end of 2012) because the Supreme Court ruled that it was only speculative that the NSA was carrying out this secret spying. That's a neat trick to make sure the court can never declare it to be unconstitutional - write a law that makes its very operation secret because you can only bring a case to test the law if you can prove it was applied against you. That means - without a leak - the law can never be tested. Because of Snowden's leaks, the law will finally be tested. Once the Verizon order was made public, the ACLU (a Verizon customer) could prove it was no longer speculative that its data had been captured, giving it standing to sue.

Since then, the revelations of how pervasive this has become have only continued.

You do not seem to be aware of (or perhaps you don't understand) the most recent revelations.

Every e-mail crossing the US border is scanned for key words. No suspicion of a link to a terrorist is required - every single e-mail is being scanned.

Every e-mail which contain key words are copied (without a warrant) and forwarded to a team of humans for review (again without a warrant). The e-mails which are read by humans do not have to be sent to a suspected terrorist, or indicate any personal or strategic connection to a terrorist. They do not have to have any suggestion that the user was doing anything beyond choosing the wrong word or name to use in correspondence. Like, say, an investigative journalist following up on leads. Or an ordinary citizen discussing current events with an overseas friends.

This program requires absolutely no suspicion, specific to me, that I have any link to terrorists.

I certainly did not suggest we should do nothing. What I suggested is that forfeiting our freedom and our rights in a misguided attempt to fight terrorism by subjecting ourselves to a big brother state is foolhardy, and will not even put a dent in terrorism.

[hootinholler]

43. One thing I'd like to mention

Is that the emails by government admission are being stored for future reference. My personal belief is that the content of phone calls is stored as well.

My contention is that it matters not if anyone ever looks at it, it is unconstitutional to gather it and store it. Additionally it makes us as a nation less secure by gathering all that stuff into one wharehouse. What a target to be exploited by the evil brazilionaire overlord.

It essentially gives the government (or whoever cracks it) a time machine of sorts and that is dangerous.

[Ms. Toad]

45. No. They are not.

They are being scanned looking for certain words, those which contain the key words are being forwarded to a human team for analysis.

They are not **just** being stored for future use. That is the old line.

While it has long been known that the agency conducts extensive computer searches of data it vacuums up overseas, that it is systematically searching — without warrants — through the contents of Americans’ communications that cross the border reveals more about the scale of its secret operations.
. . .
The official said that a computer searches the data for the identifying keywords or other “selectors” and stores those that match so that human analysts could later examine them.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/08/us/broader-sifting-of-data-abroad-is-seen-by-nsa.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

(But I agree with you that capturing them and storing them en masse is also unconstitutional. It is just - in my mind - less certain that our current Supreme Court would rule that way. Then we would have another Plessy v. Ferguson to live with until it finally wakes up.)

[hootinholler]

46. Ok, I'm confused about what you're saying

Are you saying that only the selected calls are stored, or are you saying that everything is stored and the selected calls are also forwarded?

Clapper or Alexander used the library analogy which implies everything is saved for future reference.

IIRC there is precedent in a SC ruling that says it's ok to wiretap, which is why we have wiretap laws that require very stringent warrants.

[Ms. Toad]

48. As I read the article -

Every single e-mail which crosses the border into or outside of the US is scanned for key words (names or words which some guru has decided means that whoever uttered them might be connected to terrorism).

Each e-mail containing one of the key words is copied in real time, more or less. According to the article the rest of the e-mails are discarded.

The copies of every e-mail which contained a key word is then forwarded for human analysis "later." The article is a bit fuzzy on this - but my take on it is that the human analysis doesn't occur in real time, but it does occur without any further basis for taking a peek.

I suspect this (discarding the rest) is true as far as it goes. I also suspect they are gathering up far more e-mails via another program which they are storing to look at when they figure out how to justify it (i.e. when people are lulled back into complacence). This is just the catch it in real time as it crosses the border corner of the spy program.

(This new disclosure relates to e-mail and text messages - not to phone calls)

[Life Long Dem]

25. +1 n/t

[sabrina 1]

19. Don't worry about the sand throwers, they are very much in the minority. The more we learn

the more angry people are getting and that is why they sand throwers are getting so desperate. Across the globe, people are outraged. Even here in this intensely propagandized country, a majority now view Snowden as a Whistle Blower. So let them play in their sandboxes if they want to. They can't put the lid back on the box no matter how many temper tantrums they throw.

[Rosa Luxemburg]

24. Congress should be held accountable

[pnwmom]

30. The metadata doesn't contain content and SCOTUS ruled decades ago

that collecting metadata isn't prohibited by the Fourth Amendment.

[Qutzupalotl]

37. Do you have a link for

the feeding info to the DEA? I'd like to read more about that. Thanks.

[hootinholler]

39. Here ya go

Right from the EFF.