Newspaper: Snowden Documents Reveal Surprising Depth Of NSA Activities

[Purveyor]

WASHINGTON — The New York Times published in its Sunday print edition a wide-ranging look at the contents of the leaked Snowden documents that I recommend you read. You can find the full story here.

WikiLeaks called the article a “spoiler” in a tweet this morning and accused the Times, with which it has a hate-hate relationship, of undercutting the work of its competitors by providing just a sentence or two on revelations that deserved far more exploration.

That is one way to look at the piece. I counted at least 15 items laid out in the article’s 5,000 words that deserved a separate headline of their own, starting with the first two paragraphs where we learn that the NSA somehow pirated a list of U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon’s talking points ahead of a friendly meeting with Barack Obama in April.

To give you a taste of the story’s range: The NSA’s Dishfire database “stores years of text messages from around the world, just in case.” The Tracfin program “accumulates gigabytes of credit card purchases.” SNACKS, which stands for Social Network Analysis Collaboration Knowledge Services, tries to figure out who reports to whom in an organization by analyzing texts. NSA gave information on the location of FARC guerrillas to the Colombian government. Its listening post in Texas helped thwart a plot against Swedish artist who had drawn pictures of the Prophet Mohammed. It tracked the visit to Kurdistan Province of Iran’s supreme leader so well that it recorded the advance team’s discussion of how to get an ambulance and a fire truck aboard other vehicles for the journey.

There’s more: NSA regularly sends people to an unnamed friendly country, in violation of a treaty, to visit the site from which eavesdropping of an unnamed location takes place. They are given cover identities, false business cards and warned to buy no souvenirs, lest it somehow leak out what’s going on. The whole enterprise is managed remotely from Fort Gordon, Ga. At Fort Gordon, which is located in Augusta, on the border with South Carolina, programmers have created a tool that emails an analyst whenever a target changes location, based on what cellphone tower his phone is in touch with.

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/11/03/207332/newspaper-snowden-documents-reveal.html#storylink=cpy

[cantbeserious]

1. The Depravity Of American Imperialism Unearthed And Ugly

eom

[Trillo]

2. If we little people had access to that information

it could maybe tell us:
Who our friends and enemies are,
How we should earn,
Where we should live....

The observations continue and undoubtedly becomes a long list, but the point is that most of us live confused lives, in this day and age when those above us in any pyramid lie routinely to those of us below, and perhaps having access to our snooped data would help us to understand ourselves and our world better.

Unfortunately, the system is not setup that way, it's setup so a very few can understand everyone else.

[bvar22]

3. NO, that can't be.

I learned on DU that Snowden didn't reveal anything we didn't already know,
and that he was a despicable traitor for revealing what everybody already knew,

...AND that he was a coward for not letting the US throw him in jail,

....and that he has boxes in his garage.

[Purveyor]

4. It was the 'boxes in the garage' that pushed me over the edge...