The National Security Agency is harvesting hundreds of millions of contact lists from personal e-mail and instant messaging accounts around the world, many of them belonging to Americans, according to senior intelligence officials and top secret documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
The collection program, which has not been disclosed before, intercepts e-mail address books and “buddy lists” from instant messaging services as they move across global data links. Online services often transmit those contacts when a user logs on, composes a message, or synchronizes a computer or mobile device with information stored on remote servers.
The Invisible Stasi.
The collection program, which has not been disclosed before ….
Before what?
Bet you’re on the list, Kate 🙂
They used to say to us, “If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.” Now they say to themselves, “If he has nothing to hide, he looks just like those who have managed to hide something, so we need to find out what it is.”
The NSA will suck up any electronic information they can. From the internet, from the airwaves, from phone lines and cables, and if they are really determined, from your computer in your home.
And AFTER they have tapped, acquired, stole, overheard, whatever, the information, then they will find a way to use it IF they can. But they will collect it none the less.
AND guess how many OTHER Governments, Corporations, marketing depts, etc are trying to do the same thing? And succeeding at some level? The British, Chinese, Russians, Canadians, Google, Microsoft, telemarketers, advertisers all want your information. Maybe they are only “datamining” your Facebook and Linked In, and your G-Mail. Is that OK?
Do you really think that the only bad guys are in the NSA?
We need some good guys who will show us how to hide and obscure our private information.
Really rd?
And how quickly do think that will happen?
Doesn’t anybody fight back anymore??
“We need some good guys who will show us how to hide and obscure our private information.”
Pencil, paper. Amazing technology!
Aren’t we all just connected to each other, and Kevin Bacon, by 6 degrees of freedom?
The NSA has finally collected the email addresses of everyone on earth.
Which leaves them just 10 years behind purveyors of penis enhancers, and that businessman who needs help in getting his money out of Nigeria.
…And all those generals who have been cashiered and all those Supreme Court Judges who rule in favour of the government and all those Republicans who don’t oppose Obama and have had their darkest secrets recorded, they haven’t been blackmailed at all…
The United Stasi States of Amerika…
Hilarious Phantom! Don’t forget the invisible ink and secret decoder ring…fully circumventing the NSA with post it notes.
Hey they must be getting really worried; about people taking long walks in parks to have personal discussions.
Cheers
Hans Rupprecht, Commander in Chief
1st Saint Nicolaas Army
Army Group “True North”
Hopefully the NSA’s computer system and administration of it is as efficient as the system which administers the Affordable Care Act.
In the article there’s a section where it seems that the whole NSA system was brought to its knees by spammers. Right now the NSA has the worlds largest collection of spam with address books full of fictitious email addresses. Never thought I’d find anything good to say about spam, but it appears that spam is helping people hide from the NSA.
Likely I’m considered to be very suspicious by the NSA as I have no use for “social media”, use an ancient copy of Eudora for my email, don’t use twitter, have a cell phone registered under a phony name and pay cash for my phone time. Also, I don’t store anything in the cloud and don’t use Gmail.
Maybe we need more spambots to produce such a volume of spam that the analysis of internet traffic becomes impossible for the NSA spooks. Also, it would not surprise me at all if various islamofascist groups were now disguising their communications as spam. OTOH, this wouldn’t make any difference to the NSA who’s no longer interested in finding enemies of the US; instead it looks for potential enemies of Obozo who believe in that supremely subversive document; the US constitution.
@Loki, There is a UNIX/Linux test editor, maybe EMACS that puts a sting of text at the end of each designed to “ring the bells at the NSA”. I think the command is /spook
If every message on the internet had such a text string or better variances of it, there would be a lot more garbage.
But then the legacy media would say the terrorists have won if people do that or something lamer.
And remember all, this NSA thing has nothing to do with terrorists, it’s all about the Marxists seizing power in the US and being able to neuter any potential opposition. That’s why the Tea Party is vilified, they can stop them. Barak Obama was elected twice by releasing sealed documents about his opponent at a crucial time in a campaign.
One also can wonder why Justice Roberts called a fine for failure to get insurance in Obamacare a tax. Did they have the goods on him. If he called it what is is, forcing the public to buy into a federal program or pay a fine, it would not have been Constitutional.
Sorry would have been UN-Constitutional
You do realize that President Obama is almost entirely incidental to all this? These NSA activities predate his administration; both Republican and Democrat presidencies have overseen NSA operations.
The best defence the US intelligence community has in all this is the amateur band of buffoons circling around Snowden and crank conspiracy theorists like Loki and LeDa above. They are “self-discrediting”! All NSA has to do is “hunker down”, change names and protocols and wait for it all to blow over.
Neither the erratic Edward Snowden nor the ludicrous fantasist Julian Assange has got a patch on the sober, serious Daniel Ellsberg who – love him or hate him – was a true whistleblower by much more convincing standards than just media hype.
“President Obama is almost entirely incidental to all this…”
Obama has woken many people up to the realization of the type of President who would use the NSA like he uses the IRS.
Yet all the massive data collection and surveillance by these alphabet organizations did not prevent two young Chechens from blowing up a crowd in Boston. After getting a warning about one of them in advance.
It’s a massive waste of money and manpower that drives a larger wedge between the population and those who are supposed to “serve and protect”.
But Obama cranked the volume up.
Can’t blame his predecessors for that.
Of course the spy programs did nothing to stop the Tsarnaev brothers in Boston. They were the regime’s own little wind-up toys and they did exactly what they were meant to do. The US government knew all about them, spy programs or no spy programs. The Russians had explicitly warned the US government about them and relayed factual information about their associations in Chechnya. They served their purpose and proved that a major metropolitan area could be put under virtual martial law and not only would people comply but they would gin themselves up into a flag-waving USA! USA! USA! chant in response to it.
The purpose of the spy grid is not to determine what might happen in the future. It’s not about the future at all. The purpose of it is to collect nearly infinite amounts of data on every living, breathing human being so that information can be used when convenient. Imagine the potential it gives them, to bend individuals to their will by threatening to release information. Or use it to get rid of a thorn in the regime’s side by scouring their digital history for something incriminating, anything. And if nothing is there, why not just fabricate it and conveniently produce it as evidence when they get their retroactive search warrant?
It’s kind of like electronic voting machines where there’s no physical registration of a cast vote. When “evidence” is nothing more than computer bits, who’s to say what is or isn’t?