Innocent Or Not, the NSA Is Watching You 410
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from Wired: "Under construction by contractors with top-secret clearances, the blandly named Utah Data Center is being built for the National Security Agency. A project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world's communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks. The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013. Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails — parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital 'pocket litter.' It is, in some measure, the realization of the 'total information awareness' program created during the first term of the Bush administration — an effort that was killed by Congress in 2003 after it caused an outcry over its potential for invading Americans' privacy."
That is Because (Score:4, Interesting)
So the only remedy will be overload ? (Score:4, Interesting)
The increase of backup capacity, and computing capacity makes the dream or nightmare of searching through the internet a reality.
Anybody being connected to anybody in a rather short chain of relations it's obvious that we are all at some level "persons of interest".
If you are a "bad guy" you are obviously "fair game", if you know the bad guy, you are reasonably suspect, if you know somebody who knows the bad guy, you might be needed to understand if you are not part of the support group of the bad guy.
Two level more of indirection and the whole humanity is in the dragnet.
No unfortunately there is not one unique "bad guy", so the probability of being more than N+2..N+3 of any bad guy is really low, even if you are a retired nun. (actually, in practice not such a good example).
So anybody can with some justification be "looked at", so it seems that the only way to alleviate the issue is to over broadcast everything, and hoping that the weighting algorithm finds you booring...
Guess it's too boring for me, I'll have to fish for friends in high places, ... so it's back to the "old regime" (as in before Louis Capet got his headache cured, actually not really fair for the guy, and the change where far from smooth, ... but somehow the end of privileges seemed a good idea, and now seems an idea whose time is past ....)
Sic transit gloria mundi...
Maybe it is already finished now....... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Innocent? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:End the USA (Score:5, Interesting)
No question about it.
Of-course this 'article' is also a piece of propaganda designed for intimidation.
In the former USSR the people just assumed that KGB had nearly infinite powers, this way people lived in fear and were easily turned into 'seksots' - secret collaborator or secret agent.
It was done consciously this way, to ensure everybody is constantly assuming that everybody else is a 'seksot' and to make sure people don't trust each other and behave according to what is expected from them. Of-course there were real atrocities committed, and that helped plenty to create the atmosphere of fear.
I don't have reasons to doubt that NSA is working on projects like this, of-course I assume that the totality of the information that is released is bullshit, but there is something there that is real. Of-course they want every word that anybody ever recorded and transmitted to anybody - this is power of-course.
The only correct solution to this is to stop government from doing this any further and to take apart what they have done already, for this everybody who is in power right now must be removed from it (including the SCOTUS, it's crap) and new people must be put there who must be forced to obey the Constitution.
You must understand that once you allow the government to go beyond any of the authorised powers (Article 1, Section 8), you will have nothing protecting you at all from crap like this, but also from much worse.
NDAA with indefinite detentions, extra-judicial killings, destruction of all rights, property rights, business rights, complete control of what you do.
Income taxes are nothing compared to all the other stuff they do, at least for income taxes they amended the Constitution.
When did they amend the Constitution to build this NSA data centre to spy on all people, completely destroying presumption of innocence, abolishing the idea of the illegality of search without warrant, murdering people based on what POTUS wants?
Is the 2nd amendment going to be the last line of defence from total tyranny? I don't know, it may be not enough.
Re:Innocent? (Score:5, Interesting)
This seems like a no brainer on the surface; if water falls on you land it belongs to you. These laws were written before people used personal large scale rain collection. Take a look a little deeper and see what the laws are there to prevent. It is about water rights. In areas where water is precious, like Arizona, water is allocated to different people in different quantities. What would happen if everyone who owned land in a catch basin collected all the water that would normally flow into the local rivers? The rivers would dry up which would mean that fish, land animals, farms and people downriver would get no water. That is the main reason rainwater collection is illegal in several states. Rainwater is a resource to be shared and not hoarded. Some of these laws are being changed to allow small scale (rain barrel size) collection but it takes time to catch up.
How will they act on this? (Score:2, Interesting)
Oh, you're so getting on the NSA's lRe:End the USA (Score:3, Interesting)
Wow. That was my first thought too. I tell my son all the time that this is not the country I was born into. I was a child in the 1940s. We did have the most free country in the world then. Then again 100% of the problems of the United States and the world can be summed up in four words. The root cause of ALL the world's problems is... Too Damned Many People!
Re:End the USA (Score:5, Interesting)
Unfortunately they rarely do use it for such mundane things as catching murderers and child molesters. Sure - they'll catch a few to show how benign such a system is. But then they'll start using it on ordinary citizens who might for example want to make some political changes that they don't like. Or they'll sell the information to private companies who use it to gain an advantage over their competitors. The possibilities are endless.
Helping the NSA transcend to abundance thinking (Score:3, Interesting)
"Yeah. I didn't bother posting anonymously, because I doubt it makes a difference at this point."
We don't have much time before the internet could just be used as a tool for a widespread crackdown. As Bucky Fuller said, whether it will be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race to the very end.
As I suggest here, the most viable strategy at this point is probably just communicating in the clear about making this a better world for everyone with an intent to help these various agencies eavesdropping to transcend to a new paradigm of abundance thinking: ..."
http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-dealing-with-social-hurricanes.html [pdfernhout.net]
"This approximately 60 page document is a ramble about ways to ensure the CIA (as well as other big organizations) remains (or becomes) accountable to human needs and the needs of healthy, prosperous, joyful, secure, educated communities. The primarily suggestion is to encourage a paradigm shift away from scarcity thinking & competition thinking towards abundance thinking & cooperation thinking within the CIA and other organizations. I suggest that shift could be encouraged in part by providing publicly accessible free "intelligence" tools and other publicly accessible free information that all people (including in the CIA and elsewhere) can, if they want, use to better connect the dots about global issues and see those issues from multiple perspectives, to provide a better context for providing broad policy advice. It links that effort to bigger efforts to transform our global society into a place that works well for (almost) everyone that millions of people are engaged in. A central Haudenosaunee story-related theme is the transformation of Tadodaho through the efforts of the Peacemaker from someone who was evil and hurtful to someone who was good and helpful.
To summarize why that is the case, consider, from this other essay I wrote: ...
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html [pdfernhout.net]
"Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all. Cheap computing makes possible just about cheap everything else, as does the ability to make better designs through shared computing.
There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all."
So, until the NSA transcends to this new abudance-oriented paradigm, this new Utah data center is just $2 billion dollars worth of irony.
Re:End the USA (Score:2, Interesting)
european and eastern governments are no better than the US.
scp /dev/random questions@nsa.gov.org (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, lets fill their data center up.
If everyone uses their free allocated bandwidth to send 1000000000000 billion random bytes to the ISP, or ;yourself;, then they have to log those contents.
So...
Send 1 byte per TCP packet, 1 per 48 bytes.
Send it to .... out your adsl to the NSA gateway.
So even if your ISP sees you sent 100MEG, its 4800MEG wasted space on NSA.
And if its 100% pure random, ie /dev/random and xor it with some other random data, just mix 10 algos together.
Now X that by 100 m screen savers, and watch their datacenter go empty, or they have to filter out pure random crap.
We must look the evil monster in the eye, and say, Fuck you mother fucker, you might have the dollars and cia behind you, but we have 100x more humans that can go crazy wild on you.
There IS NO ENEMY, other than the govt itself.
Re:End the USA (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, an example of that is the recent (by recent, sometime in the last couple years) conviction of a defense lawyer for "structuring." http://abclocal.go.com/wtvd/story?section=news/local&id=7056927 [go.com]
For anyone unfamiliar with the term, it's the depositing of money into an account in such a way as to avoid triggering mandatory transaction reporting for banks. It's intended as a tack-on charge for money laundering when another crime has been committed. In this case, the lawyer did nothing wrong other than "structure" his deposits. The money was earned legally and all taxes had been paid on it. He even got to keep the money after being convicted, because it was earned legally and taxes had been paid on it. He committed no crime, but because his deposits were designed to not trigger mandatory reporting requirements from the bank, he now has a criminal record.