Training Materials for NSA Spying Tool "XKeyScore" Revealed 347
dryriver writes with news of the latest document release on NSA spying programs. Quoting The Guardian: "A top secret National Security Agency program allows analysts to search with no prior authorization through vast databases containing emails, online chats, social media activities and the internet browsing histories of millions of individuals, according to documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden. The NSA boasts in training materials that the program, called XKeyscore, is its 'widest-reaching' system for developing intelligence from the Internet. The latest revelations will add to the intense public and congressional debate around the extent of NSA surveillance programs. They come as senior intelligence officials testify to the Senate judiciary committee on Wednesday, releasing classified documents in response to the Guardian's earlier stories on bulk collection of phone records and Fisa surveillance court oversight. The files shed light on one of Snowden's most controversial statements, made in his first video interview published by the Guardian on June 10. 'I, sitting at my desk,' said Snowden, could 'wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge or even the president, if I had a personal email.' U.S. officials vehemently denied this specific claim. Mike Rogers, the Republican chairman of the House intelligence committee, said of Snowden's assertion: 'He's lying. It's impossible for him to do what he was saying he could do.'"
The slides in question. Looks like it was Mike Rogers that was lying and not Snowden. So much for the NSA's attempt at quieting public fear by releasing information on the Verizon phone data collection program before Congressional hearings today.
Quote from another dead hero (Score:5, Insightful)
"They don't want the voice of reason spoken, folks, 'cause otherwise we'd be free. Otherwise we wouldn't believe their fucking horseshit lies, nor the fucking propaganda machine, the mainstream media, and buy their horseshit products that we don't fucking need, and become a third world consumer fucking plantation, which is what we're becoming. Fuck them! They're liars and murders. All governments are liars and murderers, and I am now Jesus. Now. And this is my compound."
- Bill Hicks, Live at Laff Stop in Austin
Re:No, it still looks like Snowden was lying... (Score:5, Insightful)
"Congressional hearings" (Score:5, Insightful)
Bogus! It's a congressional coverup designed to rationalize all this bullshit, with people like Pelosi on her knees before the NSA. Of course what makes it worse is the idiot public who believes all this crap and reelects these bums. How do we stop them from voting away our rights?
Sunlight (Score:3, Insightful)
For me the only viable solution is making the NSA's work/effort and all of their data capture completely transparent with audit trails, Etc. not to stop them, but so when the abuses do come we can figure out who did want and seek redress.
Re:Quote from another dead hero (Score:4, Insightful)
Page 9 of the slides show the locations of the 150 servers. It appears they have servers in Russia and China. I wonder how those nations feel about this?
Re:No, it still looks like Snowden was lying... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:No, it still looks like Snowden was lying... (Score:4, Insightful)
Because they have been saying they need to collect everything so that when they know what they're looking for it's already there.
They've been steadily expanding into the "record everything" domain for years now.
I see no reason to doubt that they're grabbing everything they can get and then deciding if it's pertinent later. That's been their stated goal for a long time.
Well that's damning... (Score:4, Insightful)
Seriously though, I kind of expected things to be this bad, and they may even be worse, but this really does add frightening perspective. If they release enough information about their systems, perhaps one day someone or some group will come up with a way to at least partially work against it, or at least muddy up the data they are collecting.
Re:No, it still looks like Snowden was lying... (Score:5, Insightful)
They've already cop'd to mapping networks out to (n>2) degrees of contact. It's the "implicit authorization to track people networked to a suspect" that makes this all so dangerous.
I'm not the first to refer to the lame "Kevin Bacon" jest.
Re:The NSA is lying, ALWAYS (Score:5, Insightful)
Every public statement they make is a fucking lie. If they tell you it's sunny outside, you can bet that it's raining. They lie to Congress, they lie to the public, they lie to the President. When they go home at night, they lie to their wives and kids. They tell their dying grandmothers that they're fine and don't need chemo. They take down "Road Closed" signs and laugh when people wreck their cars as a result. They will climb a tree to lie when they could stand on the ground and tell the truth.
They always lie. They always WILL lie.
Not true. When you assume that they're always lying, they'll tell the truth, under the secure knowledge that you won't believe them.
For them it's not about truth/falsehood, it's about manipulation of people to achieve the desired ends. People who always assume they lie are much easier to manipulate than those who continually think critically.
Re:Sunlight (Score:4, Insightful)
You mean, like, the same way we do when some corporation does it?
1) Catch them red handed.
2) Fight through years of legal bullshit battles.
3) Have them convicted
4) Hear a press conference where all the upper echelons swear they didn't know and it was all an idea from some bad apple below them.
5) Have them fire some uninvolved mid-level scapegoat.
6) See them receive a slap on the wrist, which is more insult than an acquittal would have been (since you can't even appeal it).
7) Continue doing whatever they did before that started this process.
Re:Quote from another dead hero (Score:5, Insightful)
You know? That's America's problem. Heroes. You've gotten so used to having heroes do this, do that, that when something bad happens, you stick your head in the sand and wait for a "hero" to take care of it.
Solve your own damned problems instead of blaming others and just watching from the sidelines. It's your country, nobody elses, and unless you don't want that to change, you better act fast.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:No, it still looks like Snowden was lying... (Score:5, Insightful)
A database containing only suspects they are authorized to track would be worthless to them in the context they're trying to sell it. Every argument they have made makes it clear that they see it as searching for a needle in the haystack, and all of us, all of us, are the hay.
That is, until someone in some government somewhere decides you look more like a needle.
Re:No, it still looks like Snowden was lying... (Score:4, Insightful)
Exactly. There is a reason they are called PUBLIC servants, and we are called PRIVATE citizens. Their actions are supposed to be public so that we can make sure they are representing our interests and vote accordingly. A representative democracy in which that is impossible is fundamentally broken, and one in which the privacy of all the private citizens is ignored, even more so.
Not fair! (Score:3, Insightful)
Which is not surprising, given the blatant lies and deception exhibited over and over again by the highest levels of NSA executives.
You are being unfair to the NSA. Eric Holden, the Attorney General in office, is on record for more perjury before congress than any single NSA official. Once regarded as a felony (and officially still being labelled as that), perjury before congress has become an integral part of playing the representatives of the public, and those are being good sports about it. Nobody crying foul here.
We U.S. Citizens Are All Criminals! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Is anyone really surprised? (Score:5, Insightful)
First off, almost anything "publicly" done on the Internet or through a third party server is suspect. Second, the idea that the NSA isn't doing this is patently absurd. Third, if you believe the NSA when they deny doing things like this, you are an idiot.
The FBI has the capability to bust down my door at any time. Pretty much anybody with a boot can bust through my door. The capability isn't a problem. I'm comfortable with the capability existing, because I don't know where I can buy an unkickdownable door. That's why instead I have this piece of paper that says nobody can kick down my door without being a legitimate executive of a warrant signed by a judge who agreed there is probable cause I've violated a law passed by representatives I had a say in electing. The capability to kick down doors doesn't scare me. However, the kicking down of doors without following the rules on that piece of paper terrifies me.
I've been on these internets for awhile now. BBSes long before that, playing Legend of the Red Dragon at 1200 baud on the Crunchy Booger. And there were plenty of jokes in IRC about there being No Such Agency that reads your e-mail. And I long suspected they had the capability to do these things. And after the room 641A disclosure, I knew they had the capability to do this.
Hell, I demand they have the capability to do these things. After all, you can't execute a warrant to tap a phone without having the capability to tap a phone.
But the idea that the NSA is sucking up and storing forever my emails, my phone records, my financial records, hell, the logs of every time and location my 13-year old niece has called for pizza...that is what was absurd. Completely, bonkers insane and absurd.
And they're doing it. That's the craziest thing.
You want to know what the banality of evil looks like? Not the kind of monstrous evil of murder or slavery or genocide. Just the simple, mechanical, banality of evil? That they're fucking doing it. To me, to you, to my wife, to my mom, to my sister, to my brother, to my nieces and nephews. My son's 10 months old, and as soon as he's old enough to have a thought in his head they'll start trying to pry it out.
Re:Quote from another dead hero (Score:5, Insightful)
That would probably be better than what's in Congress right now.
Re:No, it still looks like Snowden was lying... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Well that's damning... (Score:4, Insightful)
If they release enough information about their systems, perhaps one day someone or some group will come up with a way to at least partially work against it, or at least muddy up the data they are collecting.
"Come up with a way"?
How about burning all NSA buildings and other infrastructure to the ground, hanging any and all NSA personnel that can be found, and then move on to anyone in Congress and the Executive who supports/supported this shit?
I figure that would make a good start.
Strat
Re:Quote from another dead hero (Score:5, Insightful)
Let me predict what will be revealed after this.
NSA and CIA have been working on a "behavior modeling and prediction" software for almost 20 years with huge research budgets. Very famous scientists (some of the top researchers in MIT and other institutes) have worked on the system.
Give the data to the software and it will reveal/predict things that you yourself could not remember/know.
This is a scary situation. It is really messy.
Re:Is anyone really surprised? (Score:5, Insightful)
The real elephant in the room here is how this is really very dangerous for democracy.
I have yet to hear any politician discuss the REAL threat here, in the long run...the threat to American Democracy itself.
Imagine the following scenario: A guy like Snowden, hired by a Republican/Democratic senator, gets a job with Booz Allen, and proceeds to use these tools to spy on the political campaign of either their direct opponent in a campaign, or the opposing candidate in an election campaign. They are able to make up an excuse and take this information out, and pass it on to their candidate.
And then one day this information gets out, that someone was spying, ala Nixon-style on everything the opponent was doing. If you think the sh** is hitting the fan now, just you wait until THAT happens. Hell hath no fury like a politician who has been spied upon.
Re:"Congressional hearings" (Score:5, Insightful)
When the story first broke, Obama, Boehner, Pelosi, Fienstein, McCain, all formed a wall around the Agency.
"It's all legal! We've been briefed!"
Which group looks like they have the power in that situation?
If Obama said "Ice cream is tasty" Boehner would hold a press conference about how only secret muslim communists with plots to install sharia law like ice cream, and real, honest, hard-working middle-class Americans eat pie.
But the one thing Obama, Boehner, Pelosi, Fienstein, McCain, and Dick fucking Cheney can all agree on is the legality, Constitutionality, appropriateness and necessity of collecting, analyzing and storing forever every phone call and email my 13-year old niece makes. For national security.
(repeat of something I posted last month)
Scarier part: why aren't they blaming each other for this "serious overreach?" That they will then investigate, have some hearings, and then go right back to biz as usual? That's all politicians do. Make vague, meaningless statements and take no responsibility, blame everyone else, then do nothing. Instead they're making firm, direct statements. "Legal!" "Constitutional!" "Full oversight!"
Why are they so far off script? Here's how the script is supposed to go:
Snowden: "They doin' teh snoops!"
Democrats: "Bush started it!"
Republicans: "Saint Bush never would have authorized this! This must be part of a secret communist Muslim plan to install sharia law!"
Obama: "No, really it was just the Cincinnati branch of the NSA!"
Senate committee: "Thank you for your service, Mr. Snowden for bringing this overreach to our attention. We've got top men working to correct it. Top. Men."
Snowden: "No prob, I'll go rot in obscurity now."
Clapper: "Ow. My wrist. From the slapping. Wheeeeeelp, back to the shadows for biz as usual."
The mask isn't just slipping. It's on the floor. The man behind the curtain is doing a tap dance. Just what the fuck is going on?
Re:Rogers was not lying (Score:4, Insightful)
This is false. He said, and I quote, ""He was lying, He clearly has over-inflated his position, he has over-inflated his access and he's even over-inflated what the actually technology of the programs would allow one to do. It's impossible for him to do what he was saying he could do."
It turns out that he was in fact NOT lying, and Rogers WAS lying by saying Snowden was lying.
Re:Quote from another dead hero (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Is anyone really surprised? (Score:4, Insightful)
Even with what he did, he'd have got away with it today. What Nixon did is basically nothing at all compared to today's political espionage between our factions.
Re:Snowden has a big problem...no one cares. (Score:3, Insightful)
This.
Same boat here. Nobody cares, really. I say it jokingly - at least I used to - that as long as the average American gets their daily dose of the Kardashians (or whatever other entertainment they fancy), the NSA could install anal probes in their sofas and they wouldn't think once about it.
Nobody I know really truly values their rights, or why we have them. "Who is King George?" is a question I get frequently in response to my explanations of the tyranny that brought this country to revolt.
People really, truly don't care that their government is spying on them because they really, truly believe they are doing nothing wrong - when the average person commits several federal felonies every single day and is none the wiser about it.
Chill people (Score:3, Insightful)
I understand that at first glance this looks like overreach, and depending on who had access and how often it was used, perhaps it is. But the NSA does not do law enforcement, they do threat detection.
Imposing a suspicion-based, after-the-fact scheme would mean terror cells could (and probably already do) host their own encrypted SMTP servers with no archive, thus thwarting any attempt to trace messages sent before a target is identified. So even if a judge finds probable cause and some kind of targeted hack/trace could be established, it would be too late to look at data created before the warrant was issued. Why would we hobble our first line of defense against real, plausible threats in order to avoid theoretical abuses? Wouldn't it make more sense to keep the programs intact and ensure safeguards against abuse?
Even if you are afraid of some hypothetical future fascist regime that has plans to abuse this apparatus on a large scale, please explain why such a regime would have any interest in respecting the Constitution at all? In other words, if things got so bad that the NSA started spying on you because you wrote something to a friend they didn't like, citing the lack of a warrant is not going to help.
Of course there are many (actually just some, but they like to think they are many) who believe the US is already some kind of fascist state, but I would suggest you talk to people living in places like Russia or China before establishing a "Big Brother" standard against which to compare the US.
As for the legality, IANAL, but some obvious observations:
We need to protect ourselves against government overreach and abuse - we are after all a nation of laws, not men. But the notion that the NSA keeping a few days worth of 1s and 0s just in case they are needed is anathema to our way of life is ludicrous. We keep medical, criminal, travel, financial and many other records for years and years. Why is this any different except that its a convenient vector of attack against an arm of government that is charged with doing exactly what XKeyScore is designed to do - seek out and neutralize threats to national security.
Re:Is anyone really surprised? (Score:4, Insightful)
The real elephant in the room here is how this is really very dangerous for democracy.
I have yet to hear any politician discuss the REAL threat here, in the long run...the threat to American Democracy itself.
Imagine the following scenario: A guy like Snowden, hired by a Republican/Democratic senator, gets a job with Booz Allen, and proceeds to use these tools to spy on the political campaign of either their direct opponent in a campaign, or the opposing candidate in an election campaign. They are able to make up an excuse and take this information out, and pass it on to their candidate.
And then one day this information gets out, that someone was spying, ala Nixon-style on everything the opponent was doing. If you think the sh** is hitting the fan now, just you wait until THAT happens. Hell hath no fury like a politician who has been spied upon.
Um, I'm going to point out the peeps like Snowden are rare. People are abusing the database, because there is no one to stop them from it. Until Snowden were didn't really know/have proof that it existed. Now we know. A secret DB with info on everyone, that has lax enough security measures that a low level employee walked out with copies of data. So if you have access to it, you have access to information almost no one else has. I would be shocked if there wasn't NSA employes using this to make money/get info they shouldn't.