
NSA stores metadata of millions of web users for up to a year, secret files show - simonbrown
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/30/nsa-americans-metadata-year-documents
======
spodek
> " _The Obama administration has repeatedly stated that the NSA keeps only
> the content of messages and communications of people it is intentionally
> targeting – but internal documents reveal the agency retains vast amounts of
> metadata._ "

The administration and NSA can't defend themselves because they don't know how
much more evidence Snowden took with him to reveal their consistent lies. Or
who else might release other evidence of other illegal acts, or behavior that
would lead to losing funding, votes, etc.

Whistleblowers seem now the strongest defense we have against overreaching and
unaccountable centralized power violating the Constitution. Other people in
Snowden's position _must_ read Hacker News.

If you're out there, think about acting on your conscience as Snowden and
others did. Your position is stronger than ever. You'll have support from the
EFF, ACLU, Guardian, and most of this community.

~~~
DigitalJack
I would probably reach out to the EFF first as a sanity check before taking
such a step.

~~~
criley2
Does the NSA or another clandestine organization monitor the EFF's
communications to watch for exactly this?

~~~
malandrew
If they do then it should be expressly illegal to even accidentally include
communication fr USG watchdog groups. I know it's already illegal, since they
technically need warrants, but seeing as that hasn't stopped them from doing
so anyway under absurd technicalities, I seems that we need a black list
(never ever monitor these people and orgs) to match the white list (people of
interest we are actively monitoring). Everything in between should continue to
be covered under current warrant requirements. Override the black list should
require both a warrant and the signature of the president of the US and a
representative or senator from the state where that person or organization is
domiciled.

------
koops
The only way these abuses are going to stop is if the government employees and
contractors who ordered and/or architected these systems are prosecuted and
convicted.

When is that going to happen, Eric Holder? Barack Obama?

Unless it does, good luck, Democrats, hiring the best data guys for next
election.

~~~
rhizome
It's possible that laws have to be passed to prohibit it, in which case ex-
post facto prevents the current and past practices to be prosecuted.

------
atmosx
I was re-watching the original "Bourne series". I noticed that in episode 2 of
the trilogy, a journalist _reveals information about a secret CIA program_
etc. It's all fiction but the journalist works for a UK-based newspaper called
"The Guardian". After being disappointed by _The Economist_ once more, because
of it's unethical and insane stance towards Syria, I consider the Guardian the
one and only trustworthy __newspaper __in the Euro-Anglo-Saxon world (or might
say 'western') world. I like also the New Yorker and The Atlantic but they are
not newspaper in the strict sense.

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ianstallings
I reject calling it _metadata_. It's actual data.

~~~
acqq
Correct. Those should be simply referred as "records of who electronically
contacted whom and what, including when and how." Then it doesn't sound so
unimportant.

"Metadata" is a real-life Newspeak word, just like Orwell writes, chosen so
that "a thought diverging should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as
thought is dependent on words."

[http://www.newspeakdictionary.com/ns-
prin.html](http://www.newspeakdictionary.com/ns-prin.html)

~~~
marvin
"Metadata" as commonly used in this context would conceivably include the URL
of a web request, right? So that would include all of your search history and
all web pages you've ever visited, for instance.

~~~
acqq
Yes, we should say "records of who electronically contacted whom and what,
including when, how and from where, including the search history and visited
web pages" and never use "metadata" for that. It almost scary to me to type it
in that exact form.

------
bendoernberg
If you can make it to DC on October 26th (anniversary of the Patriot Act),
join the ACLU, EFF and 100+ other groups at the Rally Against Mass
Surveillance: [https://rally.stopwatching.us](https://rally.stopwatching.us)

If you can't make it, help us raise money for buses and transportation to
bring as many people to the rally as possible:
[http://igg.me/at/stopwatchingus](http://igg.me/at/stopwatchingus)

------
GHFigs
_" The net effect is that NSA analysts look at 0.00004% of the world's traffic
in conducting their mission – that's less than one part in a million."_

Weird how direct quotes from leaked documents sound less bad than the articles
about them.

~~~
TheLegace
Did you read the article?

"However, critics were skeptical of the reassurances, because large quantities
of internet data is represented by music and video sharing, or large file
transfers – content which is easy to identify and dismiss without entering it
into systems. Therefore, the NSA could be picking up a much larger percentage
of internet traffic that contains communications and browsing activity.

Journalism professor and internet commentator Jeff Jarvis noted: "[By] very
rough, beer-soaked-napkin numbers, the NSA's 1.6% of net traffic would be half
of the communication on the net. That's one helluva lot of 'touching'."

~~~
GHFigs
I read the article and rejected its assertions as speculative horseshit, yes.
What of it? The original document cites a figure (1862 petabytes) and two
percentages (1.6% and 0.00004%) of that figure. The math is not hard.

~~~
john_b
The assertions in the article are not "speculative horseshit". In 2011,
Netflix+Youtube+BitTorrent alone were over 50% of internet traffic [1], and
all three have likely grown since then. The NSA has no interest in the vast
majority of this traffic.

The exact numbers are speculative because nobody has data accurate enough to
determine them with any real certainty, but the point is that the NSA is
misleading the public about the extent of its surveilance by _orders of
magnitude_.

[1] [http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/17/netflix-largest-internet-
tr...](http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/17/netflix-largest-internet-traffic/)

~~~
GHFigs
_nobody has data accurate enough to determine them with any real certainty_

You mean, other than, y'know...a classified document by the NSA describing
what proportion of estimated total internet traffic they look at?

~~~
bulatb
Total internet traffic is not the total volume of _communications_. What
you're saying is like saying that your county's prosecutor has a 0.25%
conviction rate because 1% of residents are charged with crimes and 25% are
found guilty. Measurements are useless if you measure the wrong thing.

------
rhizome
Only a year, are we sure about that?

~~~
etiam
Many of the documents Edward Snowden released are some years old. Only one
year seems strange in light of the new storage facilities being built. The
capacity there will almost certainly be orders of magnitude greater than that.
I found William Binney's testimony at this event highly enlightening:
[http://youtu.be/qBp-1Br_OEs?t=53m24s](http://youtu.be/qBp-1Br_OEs?t=53m24s)

~~~
TheLegace
In his MIT talk he mentioned that the facility will be able to hold up to 100
years worth of information. I am not sure if it was for Americans or just the
sum total of everyone.

~~~
etiam
He mentions that (conservative) estimate in the talk linked above as well (the
question starts at 1:25:16) and apparently that's for the World's
communications.

------
malandrew

        "...but is permitted to keep US communications where it 
        is not technically possible to remove them..."
    

That's a pretty big loophole that incents them to design future systems where
it isn't "possible" to delete the data, where possible is likely to be
interpreted as a gargantuan task or where data that should be deleted is so
intertwined with data that isn't that they say they can't delete data without
corrupting data they aren't required to delete. Many if not most NoSQL data
stores are likely to be argued as impossible to delete because of the
denormalization of data. Requiring them to only develop future systems where
data is 100% guaranteed deleteable should be a legal requirement. (Fortunately
this same requirement would also make indiscriminate dragnet big data analysis
prohibitively expensive and slow)

------
andy_ppp
Even hacker news is kind of over these leaks, this worries me immensely. We
live in a kind of digital prison right now, let's hope there is a way out.

~~~
blhack
I don't think it's that people are "over" them, it's just that we already
know.

Everything you do online, on your phone, with your credit card, etc. is
[possibly] being stored and analyzed.

The shock has warn off when we hear more.

