

NSA Monitoring Includes Three Major Phone Companies, ISPs, Credit Card Providers - rasterizer
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324299104578529112289298922?mg=reno64-wsj.html?dsk=y

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suredo
Obama's administration said that this isn't anything brand new and that we
should not worry about it, but he also said that he would not sign extensions
of the PATRIOT act either.. which allowed a lot of this...

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danso
> _"Everyone should just calm down and understand this isn't anything that is
> brand new,'' said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.), who added
> that the phone-data program has "worked to prevent'' terrorist attacks._

Politicians are so bad at making reassuring statements in cases like these
that I wonder why they even try?

Also, I wonder if someone at the agency/intelligence committees would kindly
point out what this great data net was doing when two young and very Internet-
active men decided to blow up the Boston Marathon and were only caught through
(video at the scene) surveillance tapes?

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alexandrosjanis
The NSA info gathering program is still in it's infancy. People who have been
paying attention (e.g. The EFF) have known the score for well over a decade.

To answer your question: The NSA stores EVERYTHING, but they do not yet have
the computational ability to parse everything and make sense out of those
reams of data. They can certainly do this to some extent but it's very
limited. IIRC this came out in the early 2000s from various NSA whistleblowers
who were completely ignored like usual.

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jlgreco
> _IIRC this came out in the early 2000s from various NSA whistleblowers who
> were completely ignored like usual._

Well clearly the concerned just had their tinfoil hats too tight. /s

I wonder how long it will be until people start dismissing others as
conspiracy theorist nutters for believing that the NSA is doing this shit.
Days probably, I'll put money on 'under a week'.

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anigbrowl
Ignored != dismissed. The NSA has been around since 1952 and has briefly come
into the spotlight for collecting data on US persons several times. The vast
majority of people of people in the US (AFAICT) don't care. It's not that they
don't believe such things happen, it's that they're largely indifferent to it.

This isn't entirely irrational. After all, we both know that the probability
of one of us getting blown up by a terrorist is vanishingly small, right? So
although we disapprove of terrorism in general, we don't feel all that
threatened by it, personally, and think that people ought to have a sense of
perspective about the actual probability rather than focusing on how bad it
would be if it happened to us. Likewise, the probability of ending up as the
innocent victim of government intelligence probe that ruins one's life is
negligible for most people. So small, in fact, that it probably cancels out
with the risk from terrorism in the mental calculus of the average American.

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venkasub
And if this were to happen in a developing or an under-developed country, it
would just die a silent death...The way it happened/happening in India.

