Methinks the NSA owns a database system which is much more advanced than Google.
I’m pretty certain that your step #2 is specifically illegal, or at the very best inadmissible in court. Of course, it’s a moot point since this whole PRISM debacle is technically illegal anyway.
On the other hand, consider the mountain of data the NSA must pore through on a daily basis. How many Google searches are logged every day? How many people browse Amazon, Best Buy, Home Depot, etc.? Simply crunching the numbers, there’s probably not enough time in the day to seek out & locate genuine terrorists, or similar threats to our nation’s way of life, to bother with other petty, domestic crimes they may happen run across. The NSA may be huge, mysterious and scary, but they are far from omniscient.
I actually sort of doubt it. I’m sure the NSA has the best cryptographers in the country, but I can’t think of any reason for them to dump more money into database systems than any other organization - and all of those are happy to buy stuff off-the-shelf. But Google had a vested information in holding and searching large in the milliseconds. The government probably had lots of data, but you had to submit a request and wait a few days. By now, they’ll have bought or engineered their own Google-like solutions, but they’re probably still behind the real-deal.
Though you were probably referring to the types of data they have at their fingertips. As part of the government, they probably have access to a lot of government data - social security numbers, addresses, etc. But LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter are probably better sources for figuring out where you work and who your friends are. If they picked you up out of a chatlog, they’ll have an IP address that they’ll be able to track to your ISP, and your username, “marmaduke1990”. They could request logs from your ISP to see who the IP was assigned to at that date and time - which could take a few days - or just Google “marmaduke1990”. The latter is almost certainly faster.
That’s why most of the sifting would be handled by computers. Humans would only be involved with the smallest fraction of a single day’s traffic. But I could certainly see them focusing explicitly on terrorist threats simply because you want to tune your scanning algorithms to bubble up just enough material to keep your human operators busy 40 hours a week and no more. Adding more topics, like drug running, murder, child trafficking, etc. just dilutes the time spent looking for terrorists.
But, the rate at which computers are getting faster is higher than the rate of population growth. Within 15 years, the government could plausibly start branching out to looking for crime, and within months of that, looking for ways to improve their campaign, shut down their opponents, mislead and spy on the electorate. Highly sophisticated gerrymandering and laser-targeted laws become possible when you can use data mining to find your opponents/allies and their interests.
You know, I used to use that argument as a absurd extrapolation of the mindset that doesn’t think there is anything wrong with unlimited public surveillance. The logical end of “if you aren’t doing anything wrong, you have nothing to be afraid of.” I never thought anyone would ACTUALLY want private surveillance in their own home. You, sir, take the cake. I bow to your dedication.
Obamacare benefits guys like me, who don’t have much money and need medical care. That’s an outrage, an offense against humanity, to Republicans. NSA surveillance benefits the wealthy and powerful … which they are for.
The joke is on you, since you should have employed an unambiguous construction such as “anonymous” or “author unknown.”
Now chew on this again:
We have never faced an enemy committed to the murder of all the inhabitants of entire American cities, and it is reasonable to grant our government more surveillance powers than we would have been willing to grant at any time in the past. A lot more surveillance powers.
Nobody wants a successful WMD terrorist operation, but if your fear of WMD terrorist operations leaves you so craven that you will give up every vestige of privacy, as you indicate is the case, then the terrorists have won.
Agrred with WheatCat. Nobody can point to a single instance where an innocent American has actually been harmed by the NSA. The politicians, who are actually read on to the programs rather than just hearing about it in the sensationalist media, understand the value the programs have. Look at it this way: Everyone agrees that covert operations and intelligence collection is often unethical, but has any President EVER run on a promise to ban such actions? Never. Not once. The reason is that while these programs are morally distasteful they are also profoundly useful and help keep Americans safe.
Moving away from the domestic issues, the NSA has also stirred up a lot of foreign leaders who have attacked it. This is theatre. Every nation spies on every other nation, and everybody knows it. I recall hearing Brazil’s leader rant against the US… which is fine until you realize that Brazil is a giant playground for terrorist finance and they refuse to pass even the most basic antiterror laws (On the Trail of Terror Finance, Cassara and Jorisch, 2010). Everyone involved knows that foreign protests are just for public propaganda; one nation condemning another nation’s spying… ANY nation… is just rank hypocrisy.
No outrage from me because I, like so many others, always thought they were doing it anyway. I’d kind of be disappointed if they weren’t. I sure as hell would be doing it if I were in charge.
Grandstanding–metadata is unimportant stuff in terms of privacy. Online content, and wiretaps through rubber stamp courts are what we should be concerned with.
He’s cutting out the programs that aren’t effective, and promising media outlets to give them good scoops if they make the headlines sound like he’s shutting everything down, when in fact, most of everything is going to still be in business.
