
In NSA-intercepted data, those not targeted far outnumber the foreigners who are - bcn
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/in-nsa-intercepted-data-those-not-targeted-far-outnumber-the-foreigners-who-are/2014/07/05/8139adf8-045a-11e4-8572-4b1b969b6322_story.html
======
csandreasen
I'm sure I'm going to take a karma hit, but please tell me if I'm getting any
of this wrong, since it doesn't seem to mesh with a lot of the Snowden
reporting: Snowden grabs a significant amount of the NSA's actual reporting
and collection, hands it to the Washington Post and they find that:

\- The NSA is actively scrubbing the collection and removing the identities of
Americans

\- The most egregious privacy violation that WaPo could find was a set of love
letters between an Australian government employee and her boyfriend who went
off to Afghanistan to join the Taliban

\- In the process of doing this, the NSA is pulling out information on "a
secret overseas nuclear project, double-dealing by an ostensible ally, a
military calamity that befell an unfriendly power, and the identities of
aggressive intruders into U.S. computer networks"

\- The WaPo estimates that around 900k people's communications are caught up
in the NSA's "incidental" collection

I could see an argument made for future abuse, but this really seems to fly in
the face of grand conspiracy theories that we've been seeing for the last
year.

~~~
maximumoverload
I think this flies in the face only in the conspiracy theory "they are
watching us because they are evil".

I don't think they are. I think the dragnet _did_ started with good
intentions, _does_ bring some useful intelligence and _is_ kind of useful.

The problem is the collateral damage is just too high, and the debate should
be around that.

~~~
csandreasen
We haven't actually been getting the data to make an informed decision on
these, either. It took nearly a year to get any sort of numbers out of the
government regarding how many people were being targeted[1] and they still
haven't given any numbers on incidental collection. Meanwhile, most of the the
media has been claiming that the communications of millions or even billions
of people are being swept up, and now the Washington Post is actually looking
at the data they've had for the last year and saying the number is more likely
to be somewhere around 900k worldwide. I'm not saying that's necessarily a
great number, but that's orders of magnitude less than what we've been led to
believe. Nor does the article go into much detail on what "incidental" really
means versus "targeted" \- are these people in contact with the actual
targets, or completely unrelated? Is there a better way to protect the privacy
of these people without compromising actual intelligence operations? If not,
which side should we err on, and how far?

These are tough questions to answer - especially without hard facts. It's hard
to have an honest debate when we the people are left trying to discern the
actual facts somewhere between the secrecy and sensationalism.

[1]
[http://icontherecord.tumblr.com/transparency/odni_transparen...](http://icontherecord.tumblr.com/transparency/odni_transparencyreport_cy2013)

------
capnrefsmmat
A funny line:

> Some of them border on the absurd, using titles that could apply to only one
> man. A “minimized U.S. president-elect” begins to appear in the files in
> early 2009, and references to the current “minimized U.S. president” appear
> 1,227 times in the following four years.

Barton Gellman clarified:

> Lotta questions on this. The 1200 references to “minimized US president”
> come when people talk about him in intercepted conversations.

[https://twitter.com/bartongellman/status/485604791867817986](https://twitter.com/bartongellman/status/485604791867817986)

So this doesn't confirm that the NSA was reading Obama's mail, like Russ Tice
has claimed. But it does belie NSA's claims that Snowden had no access to FISA
material, and cast doubt on all their "stringent" security procedures to
prevent misuse of intelligence material. If Snowden could sneak out with it,
what else could be done without their knowledge?

------
aw3c2
Is it my bad understanding of the language or does the word "target" in
headline mislead? I read it as "don't worry, the NSA does only target a
minority" while the text starts with "Ordinary Internet users (...) far
outnumber legally targeted foreigners in the communications intercepted (...)"

I would have added "legally", so it would read "In NSA-intercepted data, those
not legally targeted far outnumber the foreigners who are"

~~~
lemming
Yes, this is a very confusing headline, and incorrectly appears to be
reassuring. The Guardian's headline is better: "NSA intercepts: ordinary
internet users 'far outnumbered' legal targets".

~~~
madaxe_again
Agreed. One would almost think they were trying to both publish and bury this
story simultaneously, as the headline is practically unintelligible.

------
danso
This is a stunning report...not least of which in how it continues to show the
NSA's apparently shoddy IT...the PowerPoint presentations being taken are one
thing, but the hundreds of thousands of pieces of surveillance data, and
that's just what the Post chose to sift through.

Still, the specifics of data extraction aren't clear...are the NSA mining a
data stream as they please from Facebook? Or are the Facebook transcripts, as
detailed in the closing anecdote, a result of a data request in an ongoing
investigation of a previously identified suspect?...which is, purportedly, the
same kind of access any law enforcement agency can make.

~~~
nikcub
> This is a stunning report.

Significance buried with poor headline, also could have been broken up into
multiple stories. This is def a top 5 Snowden revelation, with the added bonus
of a denial from a top official.

~~~
acqq
At least the way it's presented it appears as "nothing to see here." The main
story is the guy who wants to join Talibans being monitored, including the
conversations with his ex-partner who converted to Islam and who today
understands that it was reasonable for such communication to be monitored.

Kind of anticlimax for the claimed "a four-month investigation by The
Washington Post."

How could the article have been written to make the readers see it as "one of
the top five?"

------
higherpurpose
So out of billions they only "target" (whatever that means) hundreds of
million of people? That doesn't make me feel a lot safer. The 9:1 thing is
completely out of context and meaningless. Plus, we don't know exactly what a
target is and what's a non-target (on which they could still gather
data...just not, you know..."target it").

------
GabrielF00
I have some methodological problems with this piece. They're making claims
about the makeup of this data set, that 50% of the documents contain minimized
references to US persons for instance, or that 90% of the account holders were
not intelligence targets, but we don't actually know whether this data
represents NSA collections as a whole. There are 160,000 documents over a
four-year period. That seems far too low to be the sum total of all NSA
collections, so it must be a sample. But is it a random sample or was this
data selected by Snowden using some criteria? How do we know that Snowden
didn't choose data from one particular program or using certain selectors and
that that particular data tends to have more or less US persons or a higher or
lower percentage of intelligence targets than NSA intercepts taken as a whole?

I also find the following claim problematic: >> Many of them were Americans.
Nearly half of the surveillance files, a strikingly high proportion, contained
names, e-mail addresses or other details that the NSA marked as belonging to
U.S. citizens or residents. NSA analysts masked, or “minimized,” more than
65,000 such references to protect Americans’ privacy...

So there were 65,000 minimized references in 160,000 documents. But we also
know that a "minimized reference" doesn't actually mean the a US person was
the sender or the recipient - for instance, we know from Gellman that someone
talking about President Obama would constitute a minimized reference. The
first sentence, "Many of them were American" is not quantified, likely because
the Post doesn't actually know how many participants in the intercepts were
American.

~~~
aragot
> Is it a random sample or was this data selected by Snowden using some
> criteria?

Let's take one probable situation: Let's say Snowden took everything he could.
That means there a gathering of data made by an employee at the NSA which
results in 90% non-intelligence targets. What was the employee working on?

\- Increasing the relevance of data? Not probable.

\- Working on a usual sample of data? Most probable.

\- Targetting non-intelligence targets on purpose? Scary and illegal.

------
zachrose
The infographic shows 556 intercepted videos out of 100,000 intercepted
communications, the majority of which are text messages and email.

So why aren't the terrorist evildoers hiding their few KB of text
communications within multi-GB YouTube videos of cats and video games?

~~~
nikcub
USA claim AQ have been using stenography since the 90s:

[http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/news/2001-02-05-binladen...](http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/news/2001-02-05-binladen.htm)

Commercial companies then built tools to identify most common steg, and AQ
adapted by writing their own algorithms - which turned out to be not very
good:

[http://edition.cnn.com/2012/04/30/world/al-qaeda-
documents-f...](http://edition.cnn.com/2012/04/30/world/al-qaeda-documents-
future/index.html)

It still breaks down, because you need to pre-share the arrangement of how you
will exchange information that is hidden in images.

~~~
bradgessler
That really puts into perspective how _huge_ Yo app is a threat to national
security. It's only a matter of time until the NSA is intercepting Yos, or at
least capturing Yo metadata.

~~~
miga
I bet a Yo takeover is coming within few months. Buying the company may cost
less than hacking it...

~~~
drunkcatsdgaf
already got a insider - [http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/23/yo-
founder...](http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/23/yo-founder-hack-
hires-hackers-chat-app)

