NSA + FBI Files Leaked, Massive Snooping on Millions of Americans

[Amethyst Wind]

Hahahahahahahaha!

I find this incredibly funny. I'm not American so I can do that.

I have no doubt that my own government is looking more over my shoulder than I realise but I'd prefer they come talk to me directly rather than simply watching. It'd make for a more interesting day. Who knows, I might be able to talk my way into some work for them. There are worse careers than Big-Brothering the general populace who I have no real affinity for. I wouldn't care either way if I found somebody who was up to no good, I could just report them and be done with it. Move onto the next random.

I don't know how funny you should find it, the US has also been shown to be spying on a lot of non-Americans too, and if you use any of these online service providers for search, email, hosting, etc., you are likely have your information intercepted by the American spying machine.

Why do so many people assume that this information is just being used to find criminals? There are several examples throughout history of the government and figures within the government using their power, knowledge and influence to do things like intimidate rivals, persecute activists, etc.

To me the scariest part is not the surveillance but that fact that no Americans seem to care about it.

No, I already mentioned in my post that I expected my own government to be doing the same (considering the stink it has kicked up that my government IS doing the same and has essentially admitted such).

I still find it funny because America is perhaps the only country who will have citizens defending this and not just the government.

 

[Tanakh]

This thread is still alive! And for some reason people still think the money needed to invest to spy a random individual is worth expending for the government.

I could ask you any question about you at all, and you would have no issue with posting a totally truthful answer (or perhaps one I can take out of context) on here for all to see?

I am also with the kitty guy. Understand the right to privacy on an intellectual level, heck, even understand it within your very close social circles, but yeah, you can absolutely ask anything you want and I would have no issue answering to the best of my memories, unless it's data that could be used to access banking accounts or do identity theft.

 

[Hawkeye21]

American hypocrisy at it's finest. I think I will be canceling my gmail account. Now I know why google wanted to know my phone number so very much.

 

[Strazdas]

This was reported by escapsit too you know.
ALso, the original source is The Guardian. basically a upper class tabloid, that was known to fake documents in the past. Obama is defending phone records scaning, internet not really.

Mass surveillance is never ok...

yes it is.
Your going to respond with an argument for privacy and no, you should not have privacy in public location.

Capcha: badger, mushroom
trying to change the topic ech?

You're trying to imply that the guardian is faking this?

I wasn't in a public location when I accessed those sites, I was in my own house on a private network. I also spend a reasonable amount of effort to stay anonymous on the internet whilst balancing that with a social life, and the thing that gets me most about this is that the UK was trying to legislate for this, but is doing it anyway in the meantime, however you spin it. There's no opt-out, no accountability, and there's no reason to trust any government that has participated when they say that more invasive searching doesn't happen. There's also no available evidence to show that this benefits the public at all.

As the governments say to us, you have nothing to hide if you're not guilty...

Im implying that guardian could be faking. it is know to ahve done so in the past. ALtrough i usually trust guardina, unlike, say, dailymail.

Internet is a public location. if you entered internet, you have entered public location. it doesn ot depends where you connect to it from, internet site is a public location.
And you probably are aware that msot good deeds go unnoticed, because people doing it hardly ever advertise what their doing. Lets say a site crashed and a guy worked overnight without pay to fix it. what you see is not "a guy worked hard to help me" but "hey this site was down get better technicials hired"

 

[moggett88]

Im not in the USA, but if it were happening in my country I would have to say...so?

Im not doing anything I shouldnt, so it doesnt matter one bit to me what information they harvest. I never did understand the whole "right to privacy" thing.

Define "shouldn't".

There are plenty of things that people are well within their rights to do, but that they wouldn't want the world at large finding out about. Which adults they were or were not having consensual sex with comes to mind. Hell, or medical details.

Anything illegal. Anything else, anybody is welcome to, including the examples you gave. If you dont want people knowing who you have slept with, maybe you should sleep with people that make you less self-conscious?

Snip

Yes, there have been discrimination problems in the past. To this day, having had a HIV test can stop you getting hired even if it comes back negative (they can't say that's why you dot get the job, but it is).

However, I don't think that this is a reason not to share information that could potentially protect lives (if collected from everyone). It's a reason to change business and discrimination laws, and to attempt to educate people who discriminate in their private lives, certainly.

 

[moggett88]

Anything illegal. Anything else, anybody is welcome to, including the examples you gave. If you dont want people knowing who you have slept with, maybe you should sleep with people that make you less self-conscious?

That was just an example.

Anyway, are you seriously telling me there is nothing about your life you would like to keep private? I could ask you any question about you at all, and you would have no issue with posting a totally truthful answer (or perhaps one I can take out of context) on here for all to see?

Post on here? Depends on what you ask. I don't know you, or anyone else here, and so don't know whether there could be a hidden agenda behind questions you ask.

However, I do trust that government organisations that essentially exist to protect a country and its interests won't use my information to, lets say, steal my money. They probably have bigger things to deal with, such as stopping terrorist attacks.

 

[Esotera]

Im implying that guardian could be faking. it is know to ahve done so in the past. ALtrough i usually trust guardina, unlike, say, dailymail.

Internet is a public location. if you entered internet, you have entered public location. it doesn ot depends where you connect to it from, internet site is a public location.
And you probably are aware that msot good deeds go unnoticed, because people doing it hardly ever advertise what their doing. Lets say a site crashed and a guy worked overnight without pay to fix it. what you see is not "a guy worked hard to help me" but "hey this site was down get better technicials hired"

I'm totally aware of the amount of work that goes into maintaining a network as I'm in the software industry, but I don't really see how server elves are relevant to this discussion. Unless you're implying that it's a good thing that the US is recording all our online activity.

There's a fair chance that America has broken EU privacy laws, but even if they haven't the internet is not the same thing as a public place. If someone recorded your social activity, financial activity, and sexual habits in the physical world, it would be called stalking and they would be arrested. If they do it in the digital world, no-one seems to give a crap.

 

[careful]

But it's not even monitoring, really. They have a shitton of data, that doesn't mean anybody's going through it. And they aren't. They simply don't have enough time and resources to have people physically interacting with every single bit of data they have. The most they have is a database they can query for people and keywords and such.

not true. Booz Allen Hamilton, the private contractor who was hired by the NSA, analyzes this data. So does SAIC, Science Applications International Corporation. Actually people underestimate how mature this industry has become. As I mentioned in another post on the Escapist, there are, in fact, even textbooks on how to analyse this data:

[http://www.springer.com/computer/communication+networks/book/978-1-84882-228-3]

[http://www.springer.com/computer/communication+networks/book/978-1-4614-6169-2]

Think of instead of people just doing a single query every 10 minutes to look up what Bob Joe has has posted on his wall, you write a program that runs 1,000,000 queries a minute for a group of Bob Joe's, then you store the results in a smaller database, then prioritize that information. Then you repeat. You filter out the information. And you do this continuously, you never need to look at troves of raw data, you just look at human readable filtered and compressed data.

 

[careful]

To everyone who is saying "I am not breaking the law, I don't have anything to hide". I want you to really think about what you are saying. Unless you believe that there is zero corruption in Law Enforcement Agencies (you know the place with dirty cops, and with reports of cops driving drunk girls home and then raping them) or government (you know the people who perjured themselves over the Benghazi attack), then you should really reconsider your stance on this. This will affect people who speak out against these agencies (lawfully) when those agencies get tired of it, this can literally create evidence that you are a terrorist if they wanted to (I'm not saying they will, just that they can).

I am not a huge conspiracy nut, but there is a reason we protect our privacy so well. There is a reason we have so many rules in place to prevent law enforcement and government from obtaining information on its citizens through spy networks. That reason is so that we can continue to live our lives without fear of this turning into 1984 (more or less).

Yes, thank you. This needs to stop, and we need to do something about it. Don't forget that the FBI used counterterrorism agents to monitor the peaceful occupy protests:

The Federal Bureau of Investigation used counterterrorism agents to investigate the Occupy Wall Street movement, including its communications and planning, according to newly disclosed agency records.F.B.I. Counterterrorism Agents Monitored Occupy Movement, Records Show. [http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/25/nyregion/occupy-movement-was-investigated-by-fbi-counterterrorism-agents-records-show.html?_r=1&] NYT. December 2012

Mass surveillance and peaceful dissent being treated as terrorism. Not trying to panic anyone, but you must be able to see where this headed. The United States changed after 9/11.

If you want to do something about this, sign these petitions

• 
  American Civil Liberties Union
  https://www.aclu.org/secure/stop-massive-spying-program
  Electronic Frontier Foundation
  https://action.eff.org/o/9042/p/dia/action3/common/public/?action_KEY=9260
  https://action.eff.org/o/9042/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=9297
  

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has a lawsuit pending Jewel vs NSA [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewel_v._NSA] at the Supreme Court pertaining to indiscriminant surveillance by the NSA. If you wanna do something, throw these organizations a few bucks so they can defend your Fourth Amendment rights in court. America is an exceptionally free place to live and I don't think the US government is going to transform into an authoritarian regime anytime soon, despite the Alex Jones fearmongering, but this is a legitimate concern, and we should do something about it.

 

[Weaver]

The idea of old was an open transparent government. The citizens were supposed to be protected. Our privacy was paramount.

Now it's reversed. The government has become an organization unto itself. Protecting itself, bloating itself and shrouding itself in a monumental wall of secrecy. It's hidden from view of all the public, doing things no one should have the right to do. However, it's beyond the law. They know everything about us, we know nothing about them.

All the military spending, homeland security act, etc. That was sold as being done to protect you. It was done, instead, to protect them.

 

[Vegosiux]

do they have a dedicated unit to sift through people's digital porn stashes? You know, a unit with extra mental fortitude training. Rule 34 is weeeeeeeird.

In all seriousness, they have to have some guys with incredible fortitude, and maybe a little stonehearted, because part of the collection of evidence against child sex abusers is often an in-depth analysis of child pornography. Coincidentally, I doubt they're very perturbed by depictions of porn involving consensual adults.

Yeah I realize that there are actual disturbing things out there. But there are also things disturbing the other way. I mean, there's a fanfic of a giant squid ravishing Hogwarts. And that's not "people in Hogwarts" but Hogwarts, the building itself. And...well...let's just say I didn't dare actually click the link to the actual fanfic.

Seriously, when I thought the net can't get any weirder, Cracked proves otherwise.

 

[balanovich]

Ohnoez, they know I got a call from my boyfriend last week about which theater we were going to see Iron Man 3 at! MY LIFE HAS BEEN RUINED BY THIS INVASION OF MY PRIVACY!!!!!!!!!!!

...Yeah, that's more or less how I feel about it. I sort of thought phone carriers were required to keep phone records, anyway. And with so much conversation moving from straight phone calls to emails and social networking, the idea that they would also want some of that data isn't surprising at all. Again, I sort of thought that was already being done already.

I sort of fell like people who get really freaked out by this stuff are either very arrogant, or just very poor at keeping things in perspective. Like yeah, the government has your web history and emails you've sent. So scary, right? But what exactly are they going to do with that? Surreptitiously send your browser history to your spouse and show them the porn you stream? Forward that email about a surprise birthday party to the friend you were having the party for? Bring you up on charges based on that lasagna you snap chatted to your aunt? Shit on a stick. They've got better things to be doing than assigning five agents to investigate that conversation you had with your mother about what to get your dad for Father's day.

I think its more a case of being treated like a criminal without actually committing any crime.

No it's just the fear of big brother. The legitimate fear is that the government will use that info to silence opposition groups and rig elections and stuff like that. We're not there yet, but this makes people realise we could be closer to it than we think.

There is also the fear that information will fall into corporation hands. Using an email to discredit your health insurance. Finding excuses to fire important employees.

And what is this info gets leaked ? Lets say everybody's emails are available online! Then it's not some agent or a word based algorithm that's looking in your private stuff, it's your ex GF or future employer,or brother or whatever.

It's true that most people have no reason to complain or fear this.
You have to admit that just the thought of people nosing,even harmlessly, in your personal stuff is unsettling.
And there's also,you know,a matter of principle !

On an amusing note, look at this comic:
http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=3005#comic

 

[Neverhoodian]

It's the classic balancing act of freedom vs. security. If you end up focusing on one, you give up the other. Too much freedom and you have anarchy. Too much security, and you have a police state.

Unfortunately, this falls too far on the "security" side for my taste. This may sound perverse, but I'd rather risk the occasional terrorist attack than have everyone give up their right to privacy. If we forsake our basic principles for the sake of a little more security, then the terrorists truly have won.

 

[Strazdas]

I'm totally aware of the amount of work that goes into maintaining a network as I'm in the software industry, but I don't really see how server elves are relevant to this discussion. Unless you're implying that it's a good thing that the US is recording all our online activity.

There's a fair chance that America has broken EU privacy laws, but even if they haven't the internet is not the same thing as a public place. If someone recorded your social activity, financial activity, and sexual habits in the physical world, it would be called stalking and they would be arrested. If they do it in the digital world, no-one seems to give a crap.

Server elves (nice expression btw) were an example of how a lot of "good work" can go unnoticed by the general public. and yes i am implying that they could potentially do good stuff with this information that noone would know about in the general audience.
When it comes to international law, there is American law and then there is do what you want. America has never cared about international law when it does not fit them. their not going to start now really. sad but its true.
you are correct that it would be called stalking, but i am arguing that it should not be so.