It Gets Worse
So Badtux and I have been talking in comments about this mess, and shaking our heads over it, and then he goes and writes this.
He’s right, that is the only conceivable reason to collect all of that meta data. There is too much to process for patterns of “terrorist activity”, since they obviously don’t know what they are looking for, and if they have an individual that they are targeting as a possible terrorist, then they could get all of the data related to that individual without hoovering up the rest of the country.
This is about targeting ‘enemies of the state’, not about terrorism.
Then, if you still aren’t concerned, why not drop by Digby’s for a reminder that the real threat may be the contractors, not the government.
One of the disturbing things that Snowden said in his Greenwald interview was that he had access to everything. He worked for a contractor, not the government and he had access to EVERYTHING?!
I had the best security clearance that the government hands out. Based on that clearance I could access everything … except the “right to know” granted by the clearance has to be matched to a “need to know”. I went to NSA headquarters for a specific purpose, and I only had access to areas associated with that purpose. I would have loved to compare notes with the guys working on my specialty at NSA, but that wasn’t the reason I was sent there, so that was not even remotely possible. NSA was strictly compartmentalized. Working in the field was a friendlier environment.
If you are a media person, you can forget about having ‘confidential sources’, the meta data tells all. If you know any drug dealers, they’ll explain how you beat the system.
4 comments
I just have one thing to add here. I believe they’re hoovering up more than just metadata because they would not need the giant data centers they’ve built in Utah and Maryland (the one in Maryland almost crashed the Eastern power grid) for just metadata. They can’t be hoovering up the actual content of phone calls because there simply is not the physical capability to do so at this time, but anything already in text form is fair game. Credit card transactions, text messages, Skype IM’s, and of course the contents of your “private” Facebook status updates as well as the public ones, maybe even banking transactions at the Too Big To Fail banks (not necessarily with their permission, all these transactions go over supposedly-secure ATM lines but *UNENCRYPTED*, believe it or not, so the NSA can just clip in and snoop’em), all are fair game and the only explanation for the gigantic capacity they’ve built in those two data centers. It’s the whole Total Information Awareness project that was supposedly killed back in the Bush Administration, back from the dead and fully implemented. That’s the only explanation for the scale of the data centers they’ve built.
The system is useless for finding “terrorist patterns” in that vast pile of data. We don’t have the technology to do that. We wish we did (for some definition of “we” that is Big Data nerds), but Silicon Valley can’t do it right now, yet the NSA comes to us hat in hand for whatever technology we can give them however imperfect it may be, and they certainly wouldn’t be wasting budget on that if they already had something better. However, if you wanted to track *specific* people, the technology works very well for that. Now let’s see. You spend tons of money on a system that hypothetically, at some point in the future, *might* be able to detect terrorists before they strike, but currently, *in the present*, is *very* good at building dossiers on “enemies of the state” i.e. anybody who prefers democracy to rule by the hegemons. So did this system get built for that future theoretical use, or that present practical (from the viewpoint of hegemons) use? Occam’s Razor applies…
-BT
I focus on the meta data because that’s the routine sucking up of everything, while they do tend to be more discriminating when they go for content, not overly picky, but they apparently do have a more specific purpose in mind.
This is a diamond mine for contractors. Budgets without limits or oversight into the far future, and they don’t have to explain anything because it is classified. Anyone who starts to annoy them gets put on a watch list, and can expect to be smeared.
Why is it some high school drop out employed by a sleazy contractor can have access to uber amounts of information on millions of Americans yet the public is not able to know what the hell we are eating… (Monsanto, AgGag, GMO, etc.)
#SeriouslyDepressed.
That’s because there is more protection for corporate secrets than government secrets. The real problem is that much of what is ‘secret’ is information about criminal behavior, in both the government and corporate sphere.