<p>He was a high school dropout who went in the military, and then the CIA, and then to a very nice salary at BAH. And he has a beautiful girlfriend with a PR machine behind her. The whole thing is strange. As for what he let us know about the NSA, it’s like his big stunners to come will be about the Pope being Catholic and where bears relieve themselves.</p>
<p>I’d feel somewhat better about the snooping if it did any good. But since there are still plenty of terrorists out there, nutjobs with assault weapons, deadbeat dads and tax-dodgers, it’s questionable whether this potential internal spying does any good (or bad) besides employing lots of techies and BAH consultants…</p>
<p>There’s a quaint document called the US Constitution. More Americans should read it.</p>
<p>It’s disturbing to think spying on US citizens is outsourced to a company that has its main purpose as making money, instead of protecting and serving our country. How much do the executives make? Isn’t their prime responsibility to make more money for their shareholders, and doesn’t that give them incentive to exaggerate threats and spy on us more?</p>
<p>Here’s an example that sort of proves my point: if you want to be mistreated by US government officials with no recourse, then be Mexican and be along the border. I read that 15 people have been killed by border agents and that some - 6 maybe - were killed by firing across the border into Mexico (something I find amazing - shooting at another country!). The border patrol is secretive: American citizens have had to get court orders to get the names of the agents who shot them.</p>
<p>But think of that: the border patrol has this legal veil and the courts run it. That shows the rule of law - even when it’s problematic. Unless we charter police that can operate outside the law, we are not that kind of movie/TV evil society.</p>
<p>^^ But some illegals, probably mostly drug runners, shoot at, run down, and kill border patrol agents. It’s a dangerous job that requires the agents to defend themselves at times. Or do you think the border patrol agents are shooting people for sport? Obviously, if an individual border patrol agent used his firearm in an unlawful way they should be prosecuted for it - the same as if any law enforcement officer doing something similar.</p>
<p>there are some questionable ideas in this thread…</p>
<p>fact: NSA does not spy on U.S. citizens or people that reside in the U.S.
fact: NSA works with other national security related agencies where appropriate
fact: NSA operates in full accordance with U.S. law
fact: the government needs a warrant to listen to any calls or read any emails from U.S. persons
fact: just b/c one terrorist is successful (like Boston) doesn’t mean countless others weren’t stopped
fact: there are policies in place to “blow the whistle” if someone wants to; this was not the correct way.
fact: Snowden broke the law and likely multiple non-disclosure agreements
fact: Snowden deserves life in jail (and he should be careful where he goes, unless he is going to sell more of what he knows to another country)
fact: the news is all over the place and straight up wrong on substantial parts of their reporting
fact: Snowden was originally labeled as a “career senior intelligence officer” and he is nothing of the sort
fact: this is not a new revelation, <a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/16/politics/16program.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0[/url]”>http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/16/politics/16program.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0</a> (from 2005)</p>
<p>and I leave you with some words from the Supreme Court of the United States:
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<p>Smith v. Maryland, 1979</p>
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<p>You bear the burden of proof in documenting the countless others that were stopped.</p>
<p>Soccer guy–the content of your last “fact” contradicts your first “fact,” leading me to wonder how factual any of your “facts” really is.</p>
<p>Labeling something a fact doesn’t make it so.</p>
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<p>Untrue.</p>
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<p>You bear the burden of proof on this.</p>
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Let me point out the “fiction” part here. The smallest key in the industry’s modern standard algorithm is 128 bits. Want to know how much energy is required to check 2^128 keys? It’s measured in tenths of the entire world’s annual energy production.</p>
<p>Cyberspatial surveillance only works on targets so incompetent that they have no business knowing anyone’s sensitive information. That’s the problem with the security rhetoric used to justify surveillance. It can be used to mine information about people who don’t know how, or don’t care, to communicate securely, while malicious people who don’t live under a rock can bypass surveillance.</p>
<p>I was hoping someone who understood some of the technical aspects of this would add input. I thought since his other books have a great deal of real aspects in them, that this would be at least somewhat comparable to what the NSA has in real life. Good to know though thanks.</p>
<p>In real life, the NSA’s work is very boring. 
Fiction glorifies the intellectual thrill of hacking and using supercomputers for cryptanalysis. There’s not nearly as much of that as there is paperwork and sifting through information.</p>
<p>[And</a> the first line of attack against any security system is to look for user error.](<a href=“http://xkcd.com/538/]And”>xkcd: Security)</p>
<p>There has been a lot of misinformation floating around about what PRISM is, because of false assumptions made at the outset (and obviously, Snowden’s overstated claims to the media).</p>
<p>PRISM is the name of a software application used for managing data – not the name of a secret operation. (So it’s like “Excel” or “Siri” or “MySQL” – it’s the name of the TOOL the NSA uses to to manage the data, not some sort of covert operation. ) That doesn’t mean that the NSA doesn’t have some sort of covert, extra-legal operation going on – it’s just that if they do, it’s not called PRISM and it is not what is depicted on the amateurish PowerPoint slides.</p>
<p>Contrary to initial reports, the PRISM software does not provide the NSA with direct access to servers of any internet companies. But they have a technical problem: when they get a FISA warrant, it is asking for a large amount of digital data to be delivered on an ongoing basis. So Google has worked with NSA to set up a web portal for the transfer of that data – essentially a special secret account where Google transfers the data, so that it can then in turn be transmitted to NSA. </p>
<p>As near as I can figure, PRISM is an interface that would allow an NSA analyst to pull up that data from one program, rather than having to log into different secure accounts with Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook etc to transfer data by SFTP. </p>
<p>I would assume that both the internet companies and the NSA would want to make the process as seamless and automated as possible, and relying on secure, encrypted digital transmission would actually reduce the number of humans who would need to see or interface with the data itself. </p>
<p>There have been something less than 1900 FISA warrants in the past year for the type of info that the NSA gets. The warrants are secret but the total number is not, and the law requires that the warrants be disclosed to Congress (or at least to the people on the relevant committees). That’s why you get Al Franken saying that he’s seen all of the warrants and there’s is nothing for concern. (Without delving into politics, I think we can all agree that Al Franken tends toward being the type of guy who would blow a gasket if he was seeing stuff that seemed to be government over-reach). My guess is that the warrants themselves are probably full of pretty scary stuff. </p>
<p>I think that Snowden got access to a lot of stuff as an IT guy but doesn’t really have the knowledge of internal operations that he thinks he does. It’s just that if you have confidential stuff on your laptop and then your laptop goes all buggy and you think it could have a virus – and you take it to your IT guy to fix – in the course of his doing diagnostics or whatever is needed to do the fixing, that guy is going to have access to all sort of secret stuff on your computer. If it’s network server management as opposed to a laptop, its still the same thing – in order to troubleshoot, fix things, install new software, or update existing software, the person is going to need access. </p>
<p>Here’s my take: we know the guy is a liar. He lied to his employer, to start with. So that makes everything sourced to him suspect. Obviously he stole at least one document that is legit, but everything he says about the docs that he stole is his word – and I wouldn’t take it to be true without independent corroboration. </p>
<p>What he did disclose is information about legal government activities which also happen to be classified. Maybe it shouldn’t be legal, depending on your view of the Patriot Act – but under current law it is allowed, and there is no evidence at all of NSA doing anything beyond the letter of the law. I’m not naive – I’m sure that the NSA has in the past and will in the future engage in covert and extra-legal ops – but that is not what Snowden has disclosed. He disclosed a copy of a warrant directed to Verizon and a somewhat questionable PowerPoint that doesn’t quite say what he claims it says.</p>
<p>So…we live by Al Franken’s word?! What the country has come to.</p>
<p>All international calls are monitored. Not to say they are all listened to, but monitored for certain buzzwords. Why is this surprising? Not saying I approve, but its not news.
<a href=“USA TODAY - Breaking News and Latest News Today”>USA TODAY - Breaking News and Latest News Today;
<p>The article you cite doesn’t say that. It says that the NSA does data-mining of international calls (different from eavesdropping), and that Bush had authorized the NSA to do warrantless eavesdropping “on international calls and international e-mails of people suspected of having links to terrorists when one party to the communication is in the USA”. </p>
<p>Some is not the same as all. The Bush administration changed their position and began seeking FISA warrants at the beginning of 2007; the Patriot Act was amended in 2008; and the Obama administration has been following the practice of seeking FISA warrants. The FISA warrants are cloaked in secrecy, but that are disclosed to select members of Congress.</p>
<p>Obviously it is possible that the NSA is doing secret surveillance outside of the boundaries of what it has disclosed… but there is no evidence of that. </p>
<p>It certainly makes sense that that they would eavesdrop on calls to and from anyone abroad who has suspected ties with terrorism – that is the NSA’s job. But the sheer volume of international calls makes it unlikely that they would do indiscriminate eavesdropping. </p>
<p>Data mining is different. It’s a matter of looking for patterns of calls of numbers, and it’s possible that there are way to also monitor text transmissions looking for specific text or word patterns – but they can’t “monitor for buzzwords” of oral communications without direct eavesdropping – which again, is something that has officially been subject to FISA warrants since 2007. It is likely that the FISA warrants are fairly broad in scope, given that you would expect real terrorists to take precautions such as using throwaway phones and frequently changing numbers. </p>
<p>But I don’t think that anyone has been listening into the calls that we parents have been making to our kids studying abroad. </p>
<p>The NSA has limited resources and job to do. Getting the right data is helpful to their job; getting too much irrelevant data would be a hindrance. If you assume that they are so zealous in their task that they are willing to bend a few rules – you still have to assume that they are going to be focusing their resources in the place where they are thinking they will find evidence of terrorism. They might end up improperly targeting some people for mistaken reasons – for example, eavesdropping on innocent people who happen to have names that are similar to suspected terrorists – but there is no value to them in monitoring calls indiscriminately.</p>
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What exactly constitutes an int’l call nowadays? I have a VOIP U.S. telephone number that rings overseas. Is that an int’l call or domestic?</p>
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<p>I read the security stuff at slashdot and Google’s problems with employees with access to GMail was in the tech news a few years ago. A couple of IT guys that wanted to show off to their girlfriends or their gaming buddies. Sure, they were fired but the relative ease with which they could get at your things was disturbing. Does this happen with government agencies? Of course it does. You can see examples if you read slashdot.</p>
<p>The thing is that every industry has low-paid employees. There are Iron Mountain vans that take your data backups from your office in vans. What are the van drivers paid per hour? How much are your security guards paid? How much is your IT staff paid?</p>
<p>A lot of data can be accessible to a fair number of people. It may be against company rules or laws to access the information but that doesn’t mean that people don’t break company rules or laws. So we have the problem of innocent people becoming targets. But we also have the problem of people looking at the personal data of others for personal, criminal and political reasons.</p>