Privacy and the NSA

Jim March. That's chilling. I find it funny how his "thank you" really meant "get out of here now". Nice work!!!! I'm about to hit the sack so I'll read your article tomorrow. I'm sure I'll enjoy it.
 
Jim March said:
So. It ain't just the NSA we have to worry about, it's various private companies who due to political connections don't have to worry about getting busted. There's no oversight on those maniacs at all.
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What could possibly go wrong? I'm sure they're all just following orders
 
They're not reading our emails, or listening to our phone calls, or looking at the faxes, text messages, none of it.
What they are doing is gathering a database of our communications, ready to investigate it when the 'need' arises.
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building algorithm profiles on individuals, which they are doing, is a massive invasion of privacy --is actually worse than real time reading of emails by an individual.

50 years ago most people would be paranoid to think the government was listening in on them. It was not economically feasible to task a person to listen to or follow another person unless the survailed individual was a known threat.

But today, data collection, storage and mining has reach such economies of scale that the cost is virtually nil to do all that to everyone and apply algorithms.

There are policymakers who think citizen gun owners are dangerous. Why would not IP coming into firing line have some utility when algorithm/machine cross referenced to other data?

I worked for a detective agency in college 30 years ago. They used to send interns down to the Suffolk country (Boston and environs) courthouse, say they were going to pay the parking tickets for a person being survialed/investigated and ask for all their parking tickets. The clerks gave up those ticket records 100% of the time with no ID. That often gave us lots of data on people's movements. Your wired and wireless IP trail (all metadata) is many orders of magnitude times more useful.

The issue today is not just the massive economies of scale, it is the younger generations' facebook induced devaluing of their own privacy. So we have both the technology and a social attitude shift that co-amplify the problem.

If the data is collected it WILL be mined. Years ago it was posited that major big box retailer were collecting transaction data not simply for marketing, but for the identification of less profitable "devil customers". hat was derided as paranoid. As the WSJ recently noted it turns to they have been doing exactly that, and selling and trading lists as well. You don't collect data and not use it in real time these days.
 
The government doesn't have to go to the AFT to find out what guns we possess, who reloads their own ammo and where we live. They've already got all the information they need including the photos that we've all posted on the FL and other websites.

We've basically been giving the government all the information they can use against us for years, not realizing the potential abuse of our constitutional rights.
 
The NRA has joined an ACLU suit against the NSA phone tracking program. The NRA stated in their brief, “allow identification of NRA members, supporters, potential members, and other persons with whom the NRA communicates, potentially chilling their willingness to communicate with the NRA."
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Yep. This has been my concern from the beginning - that these snooping tools and processes are being used not for anti-terrorism efforts but as a means of identifying, targeting and administratively destroying internal/political enemies of the administration.
 
They wouldn't violate their sacred honor by using a powerful government agency to target political foes . . . . unless of course, the agency has a three or four letter abbreviation like IRS, CIA, NSA, BATF, DOJ, DOD, FBI, CIA, or DHS :rolleyes:

I'm sure I'm missing a few.

It's no longer paranoia when the government is actually doing the things we most feared and warned everyone about.
 
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Intelligence is like heroin. There would be no one gathering or processing those plants if no one wanted the final product.

The basis for all the intelligence community snooping, is the insatiable demand for "product" (yes, that is what they call it) by our political leaders. If the President doesn't approve of what NSA is doing, he can stop it in ten seconds. But then he wouldn't get his Presidential Daily Intelligence Briefing every morning and feel like he knows more than anybody else, a huge ego trip.

And, of course, the people who get their doses of highly fictionalized intelligence agency derring-do on TV and in the movies wouldn't feel that "someone" was protecting them.

Jim
 
I learned sometime around 1981 that the unofficial motto of the NSA was:
In god we trust, all others we monitor. And we'd get him too if we knew his freq.

Maybe I'd be less upset if they'd use all that info to shut down email-spammers and the telemarketers that violate the do-not-call list.

With the amount of traffic those folks generate it should be a snap to identify them and maybe target some drones...
 
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