
Shedding some light on FISA requests - uptown
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2014/02/shedding-some-light-on-foreign.html
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zmanian
Remember this information only covers FISA warrants that are applied to
specific to accounts. It doesn't cover a FISA warrant that searches all of
Gmail for a keyword or other generic selector. It doesn't cover information
the government obtains through programs like Muscular to get the interdata
center communications info.

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wavesounds
This is actually a lot fewer users/accounts than I had imagined they were
accessing using FISA requests.

This is only one of the NSA's tools though and I wonder if we'll ever figure
out how many accounts they have actually accessed in total though. Especially
when they were able to physically tap into Google's fiber lines[1].

1\. [http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-
in...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-infiltrates-
links-to-yahoo-google-data-centers-worldwide-snowden-documents-
say/2013/10/30/e51d661e-4166-11e3-8b74-d89d714ca4dd_story.html?hpid=z1)

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Zikes
That difference between number of requests and number of accounts makes it
look like they just submit a few broadly-scoped requests to get as many
accounts as they can.

~~~
rdl
Assuming NSA is primarily targeting jihadis, one of the explanations is that a
preferred technique is "throwaway" online accounts, with the login details
passed between users. This prevents the content from going between service
providers, and arguably within Google is probably more secure than most
Internet email. Thus, one account might be used for one conversation by
multiple parties, or even one message.

(Plus, a user might use dedicated accounts for communicating with specific
other users, as a form of compartmentalization, and of course a cell or
network probably has multiple members.)

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coldcode
One photon is not much light.

