Not your imagination: you are being spied on

[Doc Safari]

http://rt.com/usa/news/nsa-whistleblower-binney-drake-978/

I'm not sure how vetted that publication is but...


Testimonies delivered in recent weeks by former employees of the National Security Agency suggest that the US government is granting itself surveillance powers far beyond what most Americans consider the proper role of the federal government.
In an interview broadcast on Current TV’s “Viewpoint” program on Monday, former NSA Technical Director William Binney commented on the government’s policy of blanket surveillance, alongside colleagues Thomas Drake and Kirk Wiebe, the agency's respective former Senior Official and Senior Analyst.



Domestically, they're pulling together all the data about virtually every U.S. citizen in the country and assembling that information, building communities that you have relationships with, and knowledge about you; what your activities are; what you're doing. So the government is accumulating that kind of information about every individual person and it's a very dangerous process,”


law enforcement officers collected cell phone records on 1.3 million Americans in 2011. More news articles are emerging every day suggesting that the surveillance of Americans — off-the-radar and under wraps — is growing at an exponential rate.

[GTifosi]

Not our imagination? Pffft....
Hell, its not even a surprise.

[parishioner]

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/all/

[Honu]

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/all/

ditto

[Moose-Knuckle]

You mean to tell me after all these years my tin foil isn't on too tight?

:secret:


Sadly this is nothing new, this sort of thing has been going on since J. Edgar's black bag jobs.

[Cesiumsponge]

What makes it ridiculous is that encryption is cheap or free. So they collect this unfathomable quantity of data on Americans and know what everyone jerks off to. They still can't break AES 128+ bit encryption so they plan to store it all on vast memory banks where, assuming computing power advances several magnitudes in processing power within our lifetimes, can maybe finally decrypt some kid's porn stash in the future.

Ultimately they're using a huge dragnet and hoping some idiots forgot to encrypt their nefarious plots and plans. The cell spying though has been going on for years and years.

[Doc Safari]

What makes it ridiculous is that encryption is cheap or free. So they collect this unfathomable quantity of data on Americans and know what everyone jerks off to. They still can't break AES 128+ bit encryption so they plan to store it all on vast memory banks where, assuming computing power advances several magnitudes in processing power within our lifetimes, can maybe finally decrypt some kid's porn stash in the future.

Ultimately they're using a huge dragnet and hoping some idiots forgot to encrypt their nefarious plots and plans. The cell spying though has been going on for years and years.

Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer was on Jerry Doyle's radio show last night and he pointed out that this is the exact problem: too much data is confusing and useless. The powers that be discovered this in Iraq and Afghanistan (according to him). Too often they had so much data that no one had the expertise to sort out the good from the bad.

So this could be the first documented case in history of an intelligence service being brought to its knees by inadvertently spamming itself to death.

[The_War_Wagon]

And ONLY 1,600 FAA permits for gummint surveillance drones have been granted SO far. MORE are coming. :eek:

[TehLlama]

What makes it ridiculous is that encryption is cheap or free. So they collect this unfathomable quantity of data on Americans and know what everyone jerks off to. They still can't break AES 128+ bit encryption so they plan to store it all on vast memory banks where, assuming computing power advances several magnitudes in processing power within our lifetimes, can maybe finally decrypt some kid's porn stash in the future.

Ultimately they're using a huge dragnet and hoping some idiots forgot to encrypt their nefarious plots and plans. The cell spying though has been going on for years and years.

A bit from the unclass/open source cryptography side - 128b AES is signficantly secure, but still breakable comfortably with high teraflop arrays, it just takes time, and thus a target worth devoting that much in the way of resources towards. As an ordinary, ethical citizen I worry very little about this.

[LMT42]

What makes it ridiculous is that encryption is cheap or free. So they collect this unfathomable quantity of data on Americans and know what everyone jerks off to. They still can't break AES 128+ bit encryption so they plan to store it all on vast memory banks where, assuming computing power advances several magnitudes in processing power within our lifetimes, can maybe finally decrypt some kid's porn stash in the future.

Ultimately they're using a huge dragnet and hoping some idiots forgot to encrypt their nefarious plots and plans. The cell spying though has been going on for years and years.

You might want to read the Wired article linked above.

But “this is more than just a data center,” says one senior intelligence official who until recently was involved with the program. The mammoth Bluffdale center will have another important and far more secret role that until now has gone unrevealed. It is also critical, he says, for breaking codes. And code-breaking is crucial, because much of the data that the center will handle—financial information, stock transactions, business deals, foreign military and diplomatic secrets, legal documents, confidential personal communications—will be heavily encrypted. According to another top official also involved with the program, the NSA made an enormous breakthrough several years ago in its ability to cryptanalyze, or break, unfathomably complex encryption systems employed by not only governments around the world but also many average computer users in the US. The upshot, according to this official: “Everybody’s a target; everybody with communication is a target.”