

Boundless Informant: the NSA's secret tool to track global surveillance data - radley
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/08/nsa-boundless-informant-global-datamining

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sanjayparekh
It's disappointing to know that the technology I invented in 1999 (IP
location) is now being used in such a massive and unconstitutional manner. No
good deed goes unpunished. :-/

Also - everyone should use and support Tor. That has a hint of irony since it
was originally sponsored by the US Naval Research Laboratory.

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cromwellian
LOL! That document shows they use GWT to build their internal spook apps.
(Disclosure: I work on GWT) I wonder if they review all patches that open
source people make to the compiler :)

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akiselev
"Current technology simply does not permit us to positively identify all of
the persons or locations associated with a given communication (for example,
it may be possible to say with certainty that a communication traversed a
particular path within the internet. It is harder to know the ultimate source
or destination, or more particularly the identity of the person represented by
the TO:, FROM: or CC: field of an e-mail address or the abstraction of an IP
address)."

That's an interesting statement, especially how specific they got with regards
to email. There are tons of email accounts that are used but are not tied to
Facebook or Paypal or some other identifying service that the NSA has access.
To me this all stinks of the worst-case surveillance state scenario but
logically, it's starting to look a lot less sinister than I initially thought
it was.

Looking through 3 billion records and tying them to people would require a
massive database of Facebook, Google, etc. users, ISP subscribers, and tons of
other data. I sure as hell hope that the NSA can't come up with a number of
Americans spied on without invading people's privacy and serving more
warrants/tapping more sources for information because otherwise it would mean
they would already have it!

It's also comforting (in a macabre way) that despite having fifty times more
people, the US has more than 10 billion fewer records than Jordan (records =
what? Likes? Facebook messages? Emails?)

They also said they track the "path" of the data, does that mean that a lot of
the American records could just be inconsequential movements of network data
within the US before it is sent back out or delivered?

Looking at this article, it doesn't disprove anything the NSA said. It's a
heat map of communications, not people spied on and there's a big difference.

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guimarin
I think it bears repeating again, as we see yet another major disclosure about
NSA programs throughout the world: the NSA has been hacked by someone who is
deliberately leaking these documents in some super-Risk game of international
espionage. Given that Obama and the President of China are meeting this
weekend, my money is on China being the ultimate culprit.

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detcader
"hacked"? It could easily be someone(s) with legitimate access to these
documents, couldn't it? International espionage in what way? The leaker(s)
could have just sold this information to foreign governments, but they went to
Greenwald, a civil liberties advocate and writer working for an American sub-
outlet of a British news org.

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guimarin
Alright, I'll grant that it may not be a hack. My point is the quality of the
leaks and the timing is too good for it not to have some more serious
motivation than what appeared to me to be another instance of the NSA
'Trailblazer/ThinThread', etc ongoing whistle-blowing.

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detcader
If you read Greenwald's writing regularly, you know that this is exactly the
kind of information about the kind of programs that Glenn has been imagining
to exist, for many many years, during both administrations. The timing comes
from at least a month of planning; Greenwald has hinted at a "big project" for
a while now. The daily releases are just Glenn's style, and it's certainly
gaining the attention he, as a civil liberties advocate for years now and a
former constitutional lawyer, feels is needed for our democracy to continue.

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colinmegill
This seems to be already damaging US European relations in a way little has
for a long time. Seems just the tip of the iceberg.

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ihsw
There are many green points in the EU section of the map, we may be able to
infer that those nations are indeed cooperative with US interests. US-EU
relations are damaged only insomuch as the eurodeputies are willing to push
against their leaders.

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aspensmonster
>She added: "The continued publication of these allegations about highly
classified issues, and other information taken out of context, makes it
impossible to conduct a reasonable discussion on the merits of these
programs."

I can think of a few other things that have "[made] it impossible to conduct a
reasonable discussion on the merits of these programs." That they're
classified Top Secret. That numerous attempts to investigate the programs via
the judicial process have been stymied under the "military and state secrets
privilege." That whistleblowers have been hunted down and persecuted. And the
list goes on.

edit: PSA: waterphone, your account appears to be hellbanned.

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mtgx
It looks like they do as much spying on Germany as they do on China and US
itself. Interesting. I wonder what Germans and the German MEP's will have to
say about this in the EU Parliament.

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ihsw
How much spying occurs is extremely difficult to measure, I think we can say
without a doubt that this isn't their only tool.

One could infer that the colours on the map measure how much surveillance they
have to do on their own, as opposed to receiving information from external
intelligence networks. For example, green provides the most intelligence
information while red is the least cooperative.

Based on that we can assume that Germany is less cooperative -- as a matter of
fact we can also assume international allegiances from this map. It appears
the US has trouble penetrating the BRIC nations[1].

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BRIC](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BRIC)

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waterphone
Boundless Informant appears to not be an actual spying tool, but rather a GAO
tool for monitoring how much spying is going on.

The colors correspond with the amount of intelligence collected. Green is the
least, red is the most. If you expand the screenshot at the top, it shows part
of a sorted list showing the most. Primary intelligence gathering is focused
on Iran, Pakistan, Jordan, Egypt and India. 14 billion pieces of intelligence
were gathered from Iran in the 30 day period shown here!

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waterphone
97 billion pieces of intelligence gathered worldwide in a one month period! 3
billion of which are from the U.S. If that's not an example of a massive
dragnet surveillance program, I don't know what is.

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brown9-2
In software terms, it seems like someone there built a dashboard for higher-
ups, and have promised to listen to feedback in a very enterprise-y
"complexity vs reward" triage process.

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bane
And yet North Korea is green (least surveillance) on this map.

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sanjayparekh
That probably has a lot to do with how isolated they are. From back in my days
of doing IP location technology, North Korea had less than 50 public IP
addresses whereas Antarctica had well over 1,000.

