
Greenwald: Low-Level NSA Analysts Have Powerful and Invasive Search Tool [video] - dfc
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2013/07/glenn-greenwald-low-level-nsa-analysts-have-powerful-and-invasive-search-tool/
======
falk
This is how I think the Congressional committee hearing will go down
Wednesday. Or perhaps some variation of this.

1\. Greenwald testifies and talks about all the awful things the NSA has been
up to.

2\. NSA offials will deny any and all claims made by Greenwald.

3\. Greenwald will release documents that directly refute the NSA's
testimonial.

~~~
lukeschlather
Please, take the time to read the article.

> “In fact, we don’t monitor emails. That’s what kind of assures me is that
> what the reporting is is not correct. Because no emails are monitored now,”
> [Senator] Chambliss said. “They used to be, but that stopped two or three
> years ago. So I feel confident that there may have been some abuse, but if
> it was it was pure accidental.”

They've essentially admitted that Greenwald's information is accurate, they're
just claiming that Greenwald is late to the party and they've already dealt
with the problem in secret.

It's interesting, because if you go back over the testimony I'm very sure that
all of the NSA denials will be in the present tense. So it's quite possible
that the NSA has not been lying at all, they've just been counting on us to
fill in "That has never happened" when all they've said is "we do not
[currently] do that."

~~~
malandrew
Snowden left the NSA a few months ago. If the monitoring of emails had truly
ceased 2-3 years ago, I would have expected that information to already have
been aired since Snowden and the classified material he has is likely to be
current enough to corroborate this claim.

------
lisper
I wonder if Senator Chambliss realizes that he's being played.

"I have been assured ... that there is no capability at NSA for anyone without
a court order to listen to any telephone conversation or to monitor any
e-mail.” Chambliss said that any monitoring of emails is purely “accidental.”

You can't have it both ways. Either there is "no capability", or the
monitoring is "accidental." It can't be both.

~~~
dictum
Every response from the NSA and people speaking on their behalf, both before
and after the Snowden leaks, has basically been

1\. A denial that they have the "capability" to do [insert method of mass
surveilance], leaving open the possibility that "capability" means legal
authorization;

2\. A quasi admission that maybe the surveillance happens (Clapper: "not
wittingly").

In other words, "we're collecting everything, but we'll only inspect your data
if you're not American, or have a relationship of any kind with someone who
has ever contacted a terrorist suspect."

~~~
danenania
'In other words, "we're collecting everything, but we'll only inspect your
data if you're not American, or have a relationship of any kind with someone
who has ever contacted a terrorist suspect."'

Or if a random analyst is bored and finds you interesting for some reason.

~~~
coopdog
Or if your information happens to be valuable (bitcoins, passwords, stock
tips, blackmail material) and can be sold without it being traced back to an
analyst in any of the facilities around the world where your information is
cached.

~~~
samstave
Exactly!

At this point - every single "analysts" security-clearance worthiness has been
jeopardized.

I don't trust ANY NSA employee at this point. NONE.

------
northwest
_“I was back out at NSA just last week, spent a couple hours out there with
high and low level NSA officials,” Chambliss said. “And what I have been
assured of is that there is no capability at NSA for anyone without a court
order to listen to any telephone conversation or to monitor any e-mail.”_

How _dumb_ must one be to continue to trust these agencies for just about
anything, now? After they blatantly lie in Congress and then dare to
"apologize" for lying in Congress, how much more do these "politicians" really
need to start thinking for themselves?

Have they already been lobotomized? Are they lizards? Or what else exactly is
going on?

~~~
hga
Errr, given how easy it appears to be to get a "court order" (note, that's not
as high a bar as a "search warrant"), I don't have as much difficultly
believing that's the case.

The case today, that is; tomorrow....

(Technical note: right now I gather the NSA et. al. are making a distinction
between Hoovering up "everything", like all of Verizon Business's call records
in that blanket warrant we've seen, and actually looking at them. Infamously,
"collection" only referrers to the latter act. Just like how inside a decrease
from an automatically increased baseline, even an increase after inflation, is
called a "cut".)

------
peterkelly
Video of the interview:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMvFj7KeGs8](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMvFj7KeGs8)

------
scrrr
Greenwald and Snowden are my heroes of the year (at least). The amount of lies
in .gov and Internet-industry is amazing.

I hope none of the involved politicians and companies ever speak of "privacy"
or "security" again. It'd be embarrassing.

------
api
Nope, no chance anyone will abuse that.

------
junto
I'm not sure if anyone else picked up on this, but one of the things Snowden
said, now makes perfect sense. He said,

    
    
       “Any analyst at any time can target anyone… I, sitting 
       at my desk, had the authority to wiretap anyone, from 
       you or your accountant to a federal judge to even the 
       president if I had a personal email.”
    

What he meant was you only needed someone's email _address_ (or IP address) as
search parameters, to return all the connected data!

------
thufry
Of course - Snowden was about as "low level" of a guy as they come (contractor
for four months) and was able to basically access everything.

~~~
Amadou
Don't assume that contractors start at the bottom. I've got personal
experience doing DoD contracting and the entire reason I was there was because
I was a systems expert. Even if they had not given me root access, I could
have had it at any time because I knew the systems better than they did.

The details are fuzzy due to incomplete reporting, but it seems Snowden had
worked for the CIA for many years before going to Booz Allen.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden#Career_in_the_U...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden#Career_in_the_U.S).

------
hack_edu
And if they have that, imagine what the more clever sysadmins can work they
way into without proper authorization...

------
marze
Regarding the "court order" mentioned as being needed to listen/read/monitor,
a helpful followup question might be, what court gives the order and how many
such orders are in effect on average for each of the past five years.

------
monsterix
I have a feeling that everyone having this tool is a better situation than
only few-at-the-top having it. Older people who sit at the top tend to elicit
a different and often machine-like behaviour [1] on emotional or privacy
matters. Their decisions are likely to be blind to what people in their
privacy want - that is emotional freedom. And their micro-decisions could be
worse.

Rather I'd suggest that the PRISM search tool be made available to every
individual on the planet. Perhaps in _competition to Google_ (If we don't get
rid of snooping in its entirety that is.). At least we can weed out Weiners
which are on one end of porn-spectrum to Camerons who say they are on the
other end of porn-spectrum.

[1]
[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2677442/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2677442/)

~~~
northwest
> Rather I'd suggest that the PRISM search tool be made available to every
> citizen on the planet.

Of course you are joking. But if you think about it:

If humanity is forced to give up privacy, the only way we could achieve this
would be by giving it up _symmetrically_ :

If everybody is naked, it's normal and not a problem anymore, provided we can
then evolve our culture to completely drop the "judging".

~~~
manmal
That's what Zuckerberg had in mind, originally (reportedly).

~~~
3327
Not that I am pro him or not but if everyone was held accountable for the dumb
stuff they said in their early 20's everyone would have a sick of shit hanging
around their necks.

~~~
rhizome
It's not meaningless, though. I would say that the reason is not that it
betrays what they really think, but that older people learn not to say it out
loud. In this sense you would essentially be saying, "don't judge him until he
learns to hide his true thoughts."

I'm not saying this is what you truly feel, but you relate a cultural
convention that perpetuates a stereotype that young people are stupid.

~~~
3327
I think your comment is a correct assessment. Adults do learn this but in
addition to learning to hold back your thoughts maturity brings many changes
in view and ideology, and I suspect that as many of us might have, Zuck's
ideas and views most likely changed dramatically from his early years in
college to adulthood - or not. But I think the safer assumption would be it
has, for the better or worse that we cannot know but personally I prefer to
give people the benefit prior to the doubt.

------
qwerta
This is huge security issue. Is there a bug report? An estimate when it will
be fixed?

~~~
qwerta
Why downvote? When NSA steals my data I want at least secure storage. This way
entire NSA database will leak sooner or latter.

~~~
northwest
Hehe, you sound like Travolta in Hunting Season, I like that :-)

