something you can do about NSA surveillance

[BlindTom]

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.

It's a really cool idea. Unfortunately the process by which you are generating the emails would be the only thing they would need to crack. after that they could easily identify and filter whatever it is you're doing. The strings of controversial data would have to be generated naturally and chaotically by human beings for them to consistently generate these false positives. One thing that you could do is memetically popularise the buzzwords to mean harmless things. Turn Taliban into a verb for "contact" until hundreds of thousands of people are casually mentioning how they're going to taliban people in a gigantic range of contexts. Basically you'd have to go the drug route and bury all conversation in weird sounding euphemisms.

I knew a drug dealer who just couldn't handle this sort of thing. He would get phonecalls from people saying "Three o'clock yeah?" which would be intended to signify "3 grams" or something like that, but then he would go on to discuss the time that they'd visit him in exactly the same terms. Heads exploded. It was so confusing that he didn't know what the fuck he was organising, never mind the people potentially listening in.

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.

Care to publish them all in this thread?

 

[Genocidicles]

I think that Al Qaeda we should all Bomb fill our sentences with Terrorist attack the keywords that Prism Death to America! looks for.

That way we Suicide bomber can overload their Illegal AK-47 shipments servers with Kill the Infidels fake rubbish that needs to Homemade plastic explosive be checked out Fertilizer nail-bomb.

 

[ColaWarVeteran]

A lot of this reminds me of the show Person Of Interest. But anyway I personally refuse to live in fear of all this so I will continue my life as I have been and voice my concern with my vote just as the Founding Fathers intended.

 

[CriticalMiss]

It makes me glad I live in the free world and not the US. Except they are spying on us too. Piss. To the conspiracy bunker!

 

[BoredAussieGamer]

Or I could just settle for spoiling GoT for them. Because I'm evil.

Makes me glad I'm Australian.

 

[Fox12]

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...

The government has already proven that it will misuse it's political power to quell grass roots movements and political dissent, even within the last few months. This back log of information can, an will, be abused. Police states are not born overnight, that's something people forget when reading 1984. Instead they're formed by a steady move toward statism. Keep in mind that police states are very secure, and individuals who lived in them claim they felt safe, except from, you know, the government. If you enforce the small rules, people will obey the large ones. The problem is that the crime is then against the American people and their liberties (or against any citizenry where these actions are enacted). The willingness of people to be slaves always baffles me. The idea that I have to sacrifice my freedoms for security are absurd, and not just because the NSA is incompetent. By giving all of my liberties to the government in return for security, I in turn lose my security to the government. I lose both, and gain nothing.

 

[careful]

the funny part is that if you started personally put in limits to what information you release on the net, stop using things like social media, mobile phones, start encrypting your emails. you would probably be flagged as someone of interest.

sadly this is becoming true. according to Wikipedia there are ~1 billion facebook users worldwide (world population = 7 billion), and ~167 million US (50% of US population). And check out this article from Forbes:
Beware, Tech Abandoners. People Without Facebook Accounts Are 'Suspicious.' [http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/08/06/beware-tech-abandoners-people-without-facebook-accounts-are-suspicious/]

 

[Vegosiux]

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.

So your sentiment is that only the guilty need to be concerned about their information being accessible, yet you'd still trust someone who feels the need to keep shitloads of information classified to monitor you?

 

[careful]

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.

Where on earth are you getting this information from? I'm glad you're playing devil's advocate but I think your making this up -> "its likely discarded after 4 years or so". On the contrary, I think it's very likely. Despite being almost universally incompetent, the government is good at doing a few things: keeping records and administering violence. Anyways, here are the number's on current storage costs (from the Brookings report I mentioned above):

It takes fewer than
75 bits (ones and zeros) to pinpoint a person?s location anywhere on the earth to an
accuracy of about 15 feet. 16 The information identifying the location of each of one
million people to that accuracy at 5-minute intervals, 24 hours a day for a full year
could easily be stored in 1,000 gigabytes, which would cost slightly over $50 at
today?s prices. For 50 million people, the cost would be under $3000.

The audio for all of the telephone calls made by a single person over the course
of one year could be stored using roughly 3.3 gigabytes. 17 On a per capita basis, the
cost to store all phone calls will fall from about 17 cents per person per year today
to under 2 cents in 2015.

Over the course of a full year, a system of 1,000 roadside license plate reading
cameras each producing 1 megabit per second would generate image data that
could be held in storage costing about $200,000.

and the annual NSA budget is estimated to be $10 billion. it's estimated because the actual budget is classified. anyways, what the NSA uses is bought from a private corporation. and these corporations, not actually giving a shit about national security, advertise their products. the employee of Edward Snowden, Booz Allen Hamilton [http://www.boozallen.com/], has all their products listen on their website. one of their products is "Preemptive Response":

It is critical that organizations fully understand and manage the growing risk posed by cyber threats today. To create a clear, comprehensive picture, Booz Allen assesses and benchmarks an organization's cybersecurity programs, then develops an enterprise-wide portfolio of capabilities tailored to resources and priorities.

 

[Lord Garnaat]

I don't like the idea of surveillance like this, but I'm sorry to say that I can't sign your petition. The last time I did that the smelly hippies in charge of the darn thing decided to send me a dozen messages a day every time something got their greasy ponytails in a twist.

I don't think all of this is quite as big of a deal as people are making it out to be, but I do wish that the nation as a whole could move on from the "war on terror" mentality that its been stuck in the past few years. I'm not a national security expert, but I'm not entirely sure that all of these draconian tactics are needed to keep people safe.

 

[Veylon]

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.

It's not doublespeak. It's the media lazily repeating what they're told without investigation. First they say what the government says, then they balance it with whatever the opposite is.

Insofar as actual doublespeak - which is the misuse of language to represent it's opposite - the closest here is "National Security" when, in this case, it means the government monitoring it's own citizens, who are the nation.

 

[Xdeser2]

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...

Are...you shitting me?

Hey, we have nothing to fear with the government having enough access to know everything about us. No government in history has EVER abused this sort of power. The fact this this is flagrantly unconstitutional and is only allowed because of the patriot act (Which was passed out of fear) is totally fine, Now, please speak directly into the telescreen so we can know if you're an Eurasian spy -_-

 

[Devil's Due]

I think that Al Qaeda we should all Bomb fill our sentences with Terrorist attack the keywords that Prism Death to America! looks for.

That way we Suicide bomber can overload their Illegal AK-47 shipments servers with Kill the Infidels fake rubbish that needs to Homemade plastic explosive be checked out Fertilizer nail-bomb.

*leans in real close* Somethings not right about your reply to this thread, I think I'll have to forward this to a higher level in the chain!

Have no fear people! The NSA only loves us! After all, the Fourth Amendment was just getting in the way of finding the bad guys. We're currently lobbying Congress to get rid of it entirely, so we can claim the Bill of Rights are now just 9 Amendments. But that would upset our OCD, so we're going to change the 4th Amendment to "Protecting Big Companies" which gives them more rights than citizens get so we can go back to the normal 10! Hurray! Yay!