something you can do about NSA surveillance

[careful]

The escapist wrote an article on this already, NSA Harvests Facebook, Google, Apple User Data, Secret Files Claim [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/124721-NSA-Harvests-Facebook-Google-Apple-User-Data-Secret-Files-Claim], but didn't suggest what should be done about it.

If you don't know already, the United States National Security Agency has been And here is Obama's defence of the surveillance:
That the US conducts unlawful surveillance is not something new. At least as early as 1972, where a case went to the Supreme Court (U.S. vs U.S. District Court [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._U.S._District_Court]) and:

the Government claimed that the surveillances, though warrantless, were lawful as a reasonable exercise of presidential power to protect the national security.

And the Fourth Amendment was asserted. Just for your reference this is the Fourth Amendment:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Here's corporate spokescompany CNN lamenting the defrauding and embarrasement caused by the leak If you watched the first video above, you'll notice a reference to a report from the Brookings Institute [http://www.brookings.edu/research/papers/2011/12/14-digital-storage-villasenor], of all places, titled Recording Everything: Digital Storage as an Enabler of Authoritarian Governments which says

Within the next few years an important threshold will be crossed: For the first time ever, it will become technologically and financially feasible for authoritarian governments to record nearly everything that is said or done within their borders?every phone conversation, electronic message, social media interaction, the movements of nearly every person and vehicle, and video from every street corner. Governments with a history of using all of the tools at their disposal to track and monitor their citizens will undoubtedly make full use of this capability once it becomes available.

These enormous databases of captured information will create what amounts to a surveillance time machine, enabling state security services to retroactively eavesdrop on people in the months and years before they were designated as surveillance targets. This will fundamentally change the dynamics of dissent, insurgency and revolution.

Keep in mind the emerging precedent for peaceful dissent:

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. NYT [http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/25/nyregion/occupy-movement-was-investigated-by-fbi-counterterrorism-agents-records-show.html?_r=1&] December 2012

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 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.

 

[careful]

in the CNN coverage in that Youtube clip, watch it a few times and note what the reporter says:

• 
  0:10 "And he's also damaged national security"
  0:44 "Clapper has ordered initial findings by the end of the week on how much harm has been done"
  1:09 "What this system allows the NSA to do is watch you compose the email in real time and figure out, as your composing the email, where you are"

That last point is something to stop and think about it.

Now, the contradictory second half of this clip:

• 
  1:32 "But experts say it's impossible to conclude that we are less safe now"
  1:44 "Traditionally these leaks have never been as bad as the government says they are. It's just a fact. We are still sitting here."

Yes, it's doublespeak in front of your very eyes. The leak damaged national security, but it actually didn't. That's basically what you just learned from watching CNN.

 

[xDarc]

You could also flood the system by including gibberish in your conversation/emails. Like a signature that just says Osama Bomb Iraq Afghanistan Syria North Korea Infidel Martyr Explosive, etc.

It's kind of hard to find anything of value when there are only so many analysts to listen to literally everything out there. They rely on keywords to flag discourse or conversations for review.

Nobody would do it, but I would get a chuckle knowing some analyst somewhere is listening to garbage all day and the President has to have a press conference pleading with Americans to stop saying "bad" words because it is hurting national security.

 

[Thaluikhain]

ECHELON and similar programs have existed long before than 90% of this sites membership was even born. They didn't carry your parents away because they screamed 'ban the bomb' or smoked mary jane.

They did misuse their power in relation to various other individuals, though.

 

[careful]

I'm sorry but I'm sick of tired of people complaining about 'government surveillance'. This is not 1984. They are not interested in your perversions for PVC and leather. Or that you pirated Game of thrones. They may very well have that information but the numbers would be so larger they'd need an army to go through that information; not that they actually care.

ECHELON and similar programs have existed long before than 90% of this sites membership was even born. They didn't carry your parents away because they screamed 'ban the bomb' or smoked mary jane.

Recording this information doesn't mean anyone is actively going through it, rather they can create a backlog that if necessary can be used to build a case or prove the innocence of suspects. Also can someone please take into account the amount of storage needed to keep such a backlog? Even with a billion dollar budget the sheer volume of information would mean information older than 4 years would likely get wiped.

And like it or not everyone in the USA has likely benefited from the additional safety provided by these programs. If anything the fact that the recent perpetrators of the Boston bombings were picked up by surveillance programs (notably the Russians) years before their actions is a testament to such things are valid. Of course the Yanks decided not to observe them...

no less than $10 billion, to be precise, is the estimated budget of the NSA. (What the NSA costs taxpayers [http://money.cnn.com/2013/06/07/news/economy/nsa-surveillance-cost/index.html]. CNN Money. June 2, 2013.) It probably wouldn't be hard to calculate just how many terabytes or petabytes half of that budget can buy.

Also, yes they do actually mine the data. It's called data mining, and it's an entire sub-field of computer science. They mine the data and reconstruct social networks of groups of people. In fact there are even textbooks on how to do this:

[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]

[http://www.springer.com/computer/database+management+%26+information+retrieval/book/978-1-4419-8461-6]

[http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920010203.do]
So yes, you can be sure that it is unbelievably sophisticated. They don't need to have people sitting in front of monitors reading emails and listening, they have software to do that for them. How much do they know about us? I don't know. Probably information on what you buy, what you eat, where you live, what your political preferences are, who you talk to, what you talk about. Those sorts of things. Anyways, you should watch the youtubes I posted, Binney, the technical director of the NSA, talks a little bit about the technology.

 

[DoPo]

It probably wouldn't be hard to calculate just how many terabytes or petabytes half of that budget can buy.

One often repeated thing when it comes to computers and managing them (say, a network or web service, etc) is "space is cheap". Because it is - throwing more hardware, HDD in this case, is sometimes more efficient than making fine tunings. Also you don't have to worry about fine tunings as much. All because hard drives are one of the cheapest computer parts both to buy and add in, unlike RAM or CPU, you can plug in the HDD and not shutdown the machine to do so. Anyway, point is - space is cheap. Really. Space is not supposed to be a big issue.

Also, yes they do actually mine the data. It's called data mining, and it's an entire sub-field of computer science.

Also worth noting, even if data storage is an issue, then you can use data mining either to extract what you need or at least remove most of the noise so you now have way less data to store. you can then even extract data in order to compress it and compression tends to work very well for making good use of that space, too. Space is not only cheap, it isn't an issue.

 

[BoredRolePlayer]

I just wanna point out that facebook uses your information and tracks were you go to target ads at you, google reads your emails and targets ads at you and stores your history in their servers....so it's not just the government who spies and tracks where you go. And lets not forget when people learned (every year) that apple is tracking the geolocation. This "news" about tracking personal information is not new, just the scope of it. So I'm kinda tired of hearing about how people are shocked, I agree this is to much and out of control; yet this idea of snooping is not new.

 

[Frission]

This was a huge misuse of power and a complete disrespect for the basics of privacy. The question is what now?

I thought I would stop seeing shit like this after Bush was gone. How silly of me.

 

[BoredRolePlayer]

This was a huge misuse of power and a complete disrespect for the basics of privacy. The question is what now?

I thought I would stop seeing shit like this after Bush was gone. How silly of me.

I think that was the stupid disillusion people had when Obama first came into office, just because a new president is in office doesn't automatically the old policies are gone. Odds are new one are quickly added faster compared to removing old ones the haunt the country. I mean we still have DOMA floating around from the Clinton days for gods sake.

 

[michael87cn]

Power corrupts. This is too much power for them to have. I shudder to think what a tyrant could do with that much power. Where would you run? How would you run? How would you fight back? You can't beat tanks and jets with handguns and hunting rifles. The world has changed. For the worse...

Also, the "war on terrorists" is getting so old. Terrorists are usually a small band of a handful of people, you don't need to waste $10 billion a year (for fucks sake!) to protect the entire country from what could be a couple dozen/hundred casualties (if terrorists did attack somewhere). This is like, something a local military base would worry about not an entire government for going on a decade now.

It's all just excuses for them to up their arsenals.

 

[zefichan]

I am aware of what data mining is; but my point still stands. Assuming that they're observing 300 million people minimum and mining such data; your still going to get numerous reports of irrelevant data even after numerous sets of data filtration. And assuming say 90% of the information is 'noise', its likely discarded after 4 years or so when there is no likelihood of its usefulness. And since the most of the publics activities are classified as such the vast majority have little to worry about. It's a bit like trying to find black grains of sand on a white beach. They're not interested in the white grains.

I am sorry to phrase it like this, but you don't understand how computers work. At all. Your point doesn't stand due to this. You're like someone saying that it's impossible to send a package to the other end of the world in two days because you're too ignorant about current technology.

Storage is meaningless. The NSA has enough space to save the data of the entire world for the next decade already. This is a fact. Another fact is that you can also easily sift through this kind of information. Noise doesn't matter, there are filters that kill your noise easily.


You are also stupid to think that as a normal citizen, you're safe. This is a fallacy that stupid people always spouted. You may be safe NOW, but what if five years from now, things you are doing now are illegal and persecuted? You are now within a pattern, and get put on surveillance lists just for that.

This has happened repeatedly in history. Only a fool thinks they are safe from this - a fool like you, that is unable to learn from history.

 

[KoudelkaMorgan]

The best way to counter all this spying is for all of us to start doing such devastatingly repellant things online that they have no choice but to look away or join in and be one with the perversion.

Or we could all hide in our own personal Vault-Tec Vaults and live off the grid.

Or you could just grow the fuck up and realize that our species is, along with all life and the universe itself, subject to entropy and live what sad little time is left in your lives accordingly.

Do you have your own spy network, or omnipresent government that is armed to the teeth? No? Then accept you have no control over who sees what you do electronically and go about your business as usual. Because nothing has changed.

The only real control any of us have in our lives that is solely ours, is how it ends. We don't get to enjoy such naive notions of privacy when there are billions of people out there going about their, at times, disgusting and/or illegal business.

 

[BlindTom]

The best way to counter all this spying is for all of us to start doing such devastatingly repellant things online that they have no choice but to look away or join in and be one with the perversion.

Or we could all hide in our own personal Vault-Tec Vaults and live off the grid.

Or you could just grow the fuck up and realize that our species is, along with all life and the universe itself, subject to entropy and live what sad little time is left in your lives accordingly.

Do you have your own spy network, or omnipresent government that is armed to the teeth? No? Then accept you have no control over who sees what you do electronically and go about your business as usual. Because nothing has changed.

The only real control any of us have in our lives that is solely ours, is how it ends. We don't get to enjoy such naive notions of privacy when there are billions of people out there going about their, at times, disgusting and/or illegal business.

Watch you don't cut yourself on all that edge, titch. The things you enjoy today are the result of people taking an active interest in how their country is run. Existential wankery is all well and good when you're feeling lazy and apathetic, but there are a lot of people who have been hurt very badly across the world who don't have the luxury of being either of those things.

There are sweatshops out there with nets to prevent their workers from jumping off the roof. You might not care about this but the people who do are not "naive" for being brave enough to take these things on board. The horrible things in the world are not a result of "Eeeeeehhvilll." They come from those too lazy to take an interest or stand. They come from 'blowjobs and television' complacency regardless of what nihilistic, dare I say naive, wrapper is placed around it.

 

[BiscuitTrouser]

You could also flood the system by including gibberish in your conversation/emails. Like a signature that just says Osama Bomb Iraq Afghanistan Syria North Korea Infidel Martyr Explosive, etc.

You could set up a few virtual machines that automatically send thousands of emails to each other with those keywords inside. Its not particularly difficult, its the same thing spam bots use to send Viagra emails. You could potentially send thousands of emails in a short space of time. I wonder how they would cope with the overload.

If youre willing to go illegal some anon groups have a huge series of botnets, which are basically slaved computers that other people own which can be given remote commands because they have been infected by malware. Usually the anon groups use this to initiate large scale ddos attacks. You COULD repurpose it for mass email sending, some spam companies do, but this is illegal and an invasion of another persons privacy anyway which is hypocritical to the extreme. Potentially hilarious though, a large portion of the world could be designated people of interest. Again, this technology is commonly used by spambots to make your friends send stupid emails about drugs and such so it definitely works in practice. If youre willing to be a massive dick and infect people with malware you could pretty much do a forced "I am sparticus" routine.

 

[Vegosiux]

The best way to counter all this spying is for all of us to start doing such devastatingly repellant things online that they have no choice but to look away or join in and be one with the perversion.

As I suggested before, every internet user should strive to use the phrase "insect overlords" at least seven times a day in their online communication. Just to troll them, you see. It's a bit like a DDoS, flood the internet tubes with useless data. The kittens running the internet can handle it.

The only real control any of us have in our lives that is solely ours, is how it ends. We don't get to enjoy such naive notions of privacy when there are billions of people out there going about their, at times, disgusting and/or illegal business.

Doesn't mean any of us should like, put up with, or try not to change parts of that fact. Changes in society come from those dissatisfied with the status quo, not those who either support it or don't care enough to figure out whether or not they support it.

You are also stupid to think that as a normal citizen, you're safe. This is a fallacy that stupid people always spouted. You may be safe NOW, but what if five years from now, things you are doing now are illegal and persecuted? You are now within a pattern, and get put on surveillance lists just for that.

Article I, section 9 of US consititution prohibits passing of ex post facto legislation. Most of the Western countries also frown on that, and many outright prohibit it as well. It seems to generally be accepted that amnesty can be granted retroactively, but bringing you in on charges of something that was not illegal at the time of the act, not so much.

This has happened repeatedly in history. Only a fool thinks they are safe from this - a fool like you, that is unable to learn from history.

People are not safe from this as long as they're complacent. Generally people are too complacent though. They really should be keeping an eye on their rulers more closely.

Also, the "war on terrorists" is getting so old.

And ironically, the terrorists have won that one precisely because your government decided to fight it. It turned out to be like "Terrorists want to destroy your freedoms! The freedoms we will now take away from you so that we can fight them."

 

[Angie7F]

I dont see why we need to be concerned about this.
I know I am not doing anything wrong, so I dont care if someone is reading my emails.