Prism and Verizon surveillance discussion thread

[McGrupp]

Apparently the NSA is now claiming that they can't search their own emails.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/07/23/204943239/the-nsa-says-it-cant-search-its-own-email

Over the past weeks, we have learned the National Security Agency has the capability to produced throughout the world.

Today, ProPublica reports that when it comes to parsing email sent by its own employees, the United States' spy agency does not have the technology for it.

At least that's what the investigative outfit said the NSA told them in response to a Freedom of Information Act request.

"There's no central method to search an email at this time with the way our records are set up, unfortunately," NSA Freedom of Information Act officer Cindy Blacker told me last week.

The system is "a little antiquated and archaic," she added.

I could be off base, but this seems to me to highlight that without the complicity of external companies such as Facebook and Google, they would not have the ability to monitor the way that they have been. Though, again this is more a random thought I had than anything else.

[Cain]

Or they're lying:

At least that's what the investigative outfit said the NSA told them in response to a Freedom of Information Act request.

Uh huh.  Yeah, sure.  Did the dog eat your homework, Cindy Blacker?

[McGrupp]

Or they're lying:

At least that's what the investigative outfit said the NSA told them in response to a Freedom of Information Act request.

Uh huh.  Yeah, sure.  Did the dog eat your homework, Cindy Blacker?

Yeah, I guess I momentarily hoped that maybe the NSA was inept at what they do. Although the lying certainly wins the 'what is more likely test'.

I did notice that Blacker phrased her words carefully in the one quote:

"A few days after filing the request, Blacker called, asking me to narrow my request since the FOIA office can search emails only 'person by person,' rather than in bulk.

This seems to imply that the NSA could do the search, but the FOIA can't/won't/doesn't have to. Weasel words and red tape at best but, yeah probably just lying.

[Doktor Howl]

http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/nsa-tool-tracks-all-internet-conversations-says-guardian-6C10808165

Run, kid, run.

[Salty]

http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/nsa-tool-tracks-all-internet-conversations-says-guardian-6C10808165

Run, kid, run.

HOLY SHIT.

[Junkenstein]

http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/nsa-tool-tracks-all-internet-conversations-says-guardian-6C10808165

Run, kid, run.

HOLY SHIT.

HAHAHAHA

You know, with enough money in the right places at DARPA we could probably have a functional psuedo "minority report" device by the end of next year.

Or they've already got one.

BRB, someone at the door.

[Doktor Howl]

What's really sort of captured my attentions and my affections is the people who holler this shit out and then run like hell.  Snowden, Assange, etc.

I love these guys, regardless of any personal failings they are alleged to have, in the same manner that I loved James Brown when he went screaming across 4 states.  Moreso, even, because they did something positive before they ran.

[Junkenstein]

I think it may be because it's a refreshing blast of truth in an age that is increasingly dominated by loud, repeated bullshit.

The manic voice shouting "LOL NO! HERE'S CITATIONS" can't help but be a figure of admiration. Even if it's because you know the end is highly unlikely to be "Peacefully in their sleep surrounded by grandchildren"

[Cain]

Yes, there was quite the fuss in Germany about XKeyscore, when news of German intelligence receiving it from the Americans was first reported.  Seems the information sharing between the BND and American intelligence is most...prolific.

Australia and New Zealand also use XKeyscore, alongside the US government.  I would not be surprised to learn that the UK and Canada were also part of it.

It also takes in so much data, they can only afford to store information from the program for 3-5 days in most cases.  20 terabytes, according to the Guardian/Snowden information.  There is no way you can claim such a program is not a digital dragnet of the widest kind.

[Junkenstein]

"Wednesday. 10.36 PM. It's a wet night in the city of angels. Cain reminds everyone that the claims you are likely to see over the coming weeks are likely lies. I'm restless and can't stop thinking about this film every time someone says that word. Now back to whistling in a part of town it's inadvisable to stand around whistling in"
                                               /

[Left]

You know, with enough money in the right places at DARPA we could probably have a functional psuedo "minority report" device by the end of next year.

Or they've already got one.

BRB, someone at the door.

[Cain]

Antifascist Calling brings us more interesting information:

Who might also have a compelling interest in cataloging and searching through very large data sets, away from prying eyes, and at granular levels to boot? It should be clear following Snowden's disclosures, what's good for commerce is also a highly-prized commodity among global eavesdroppers.

Despite benefits for medical and scientific researchers sifting through mountains of data, as Ars Technica pointed out BigTable and Hadoop "lacked compartmentalized security" vital to spy shops, so "in 2008, NSA set out to create a better version of BigTable, called Accumulo."

Developed by agency specialists, it was eventually handed off to the "non-profit" Apache Software Foundation. Touted as an open software platform, Accumulo is described in Apache literature as "a robust, scalable, high performance data storage and retrieval system."

"The platform allows for compartmentalization of segments of big data storage through an approach called cell-level security. The security level of each cell within an Accumulo table can be set independently, hiding it from users who don't have a need to know: whole sections of data tables can be hidden from view in such a way that users (and applications) without clearance would never know they weren't there," Ars Technica explained.

The tech site Gigaom noted, Accumulo is the "technological linchpin to everything the NSA is doing from a data-analysis perspective," enabling agency analysts to "generate near real-time reports from specific patterns in data," Ars averred.

"For instance, the system could look for specific words or addressees in e-mail messages that come from a range of IP addresses; or, it could look for phone numbers that are two degrees of separation from a target's phone number. Then it can spit those chosen e-mails or phone numbers into another database, where NSA workers could peruse it at their leisure."

(Since that Ars piece appeared, we have since learned that NSA is now conducting what is described as "three-hop analysis," that is, three degrees of separation from a target's email or phone number. This data dragnet "could allow the government to mine the records of 2.5 million Americans when investigating one suspected terrorist," the Associated Press observed).

"In other words," Ars explained, "Accumulo allows the NSA to do what Google does with your e-mails and Web searches--only with everything that flows across the Internet, or with every phone call you make."

A crude illustration (at the top of this post), shows that all data collected in X-KEYSCORE "sessions" are processed in petabyte scale batches captured from "web-based searches" that can be "retrospectively" queried to locate and profile a "target."

This requires enormous processing power; a problem the agency may have solved with Accumulo or similar applications.

Once collected, data is separated into digestible fragments (phone numbers, email addresses and log ins), then reassembled at lightning speeds for searchable queries in graphic form. Information gathered in the hopper includes not only metadata tables, but the "full log," including what spooks call Digital Network Intelligence, i.e., user content.

And while it may not yet be practical for NSA to collect and store each single packet flowing through the pipes, the agency is already collecting and storing vast reams of data intercepted from our phone records, IP addresses, emails, web searches and visits, and is doing so in much the same way that Amazon, eBay, Google and Yahoo does.

As the volume of global communications increase each year at near exponential levels, data storage and processing pose distinct problems.

Indeed, Cisco Systems forecast in their 2012 Visual Networking Index that global IP traffic will grow three-fold over the next five years and will carry up to 4 exabytes of data per day, for an annual rate of 1.4 zettabytes by 2017.

This does much to explain why NSA is building a $2 billion Utah Data Center with 22 acres of digital storage space that can hold up to 5 zettabytes of data and expanding already existing centers at Fort Gordon, Lackland Air Force Base, NSA Hawaii and at the agency's Fort Meade headquarters.

Additionally, NSA is feverishly working to bring supercomputers online "that can execute a quadrillion operations a second" at the Multiprogram Research facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee where enriched uranium for nuclear weapons is manufactured, as James Bamford disclosed last year in Wired.

[The Johnny]

with that much processing power, were not that far from skynet 

[Cain]

And while I'm here

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/06/20/194513/obamas-crackdown-views-leaks-as.html

In an initiative aimed at rooting out future leakers and other security violators, President Barack Obama has ordered federal employees to report suspicious actions of their colleagues based on behavioral profiling techniques that are not scientifically proven to work, according to experts and government documents.

The techniques are a key pillar of the Insider Threat Program, an unprecedented government-wide crackdown under which millions of federal bureaucrats and contractors must watch out for "high-risk persons or behaviors" among co-workers. Those who fail to report them could face penalties, including criminal charges.

[Lord Cataplanga]

...Those who fail to report them could face penalties, including criminal charges.

Is this a usual thing to do?
Sounds like it could be very counter-productive.