850 Billion NSA Surveillance Records Searchable By Domestic Law Enforcement 207
onproton (3434437) writes The Intercept reported today on classified documents revealing that the NSA has built its own "Google-like" search engine to provide over 850 billion collected records directly to law enforcement agencies, including the FBI and the DEA. Reporter Ryan Gallagher explains, "The documents provide the first definitive evidence that the NSA has for years made massive amounts of surveillance data directly accessible to domestic law enforcement agencies." The search engine, called ICREACH, allows analysts to search an array of databases, some of which contain metadata collected on innocent American citizens, for the purposes of "foreign intelligence." However, questions have been raised over its potential for abuse in what is known as "parallel construction," a process in which agencies use surveillance resources in domestic investigations, and then later cover it up by creating a different evidence trail to use in court.
ICREACH? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:ICREACH? (Score:5, Insightful)
No, it won't. The US govt. figured out something that the Russians still didn't. Talk is cheap, actions are rare. You can let them talk and talk and talk, you just make up some excuse to arrest or harass the few who act. There won't be so many so you can usually hide it under drug arrests or something else innocent looking. With enough laws on the books, everyone is guilty of something and since you know what everyone is doing, you can arrest pretty much anyone for a legitimate on the books crime. And if you cannot arrest them, maybe their family or friends did something illegal. You can blackmail, bargain, ... That is the power of NSA.
Re:ICREACH? (Score:4, Insightful)
You don't seem to understand what a "chilling effect" is.
Simply knowing that your every word and every movement is recorded and available for inspection at any time is extremely chilling. When you constantly have to worry about how your words and actions might be misconstrued, either accidentally or deliberately, then by definition you can't speak freely anymore and you no longer have freedom of association.
Re:ICREACH? (Score:5, Informative)
I lived through it in a socialist state on the other side of the iron curtain, so don't tell me I don't understand it. I've experienced "Chilling Effect" or "auto-censorship" as we used to call it first hand.
But I am telling you that this is not going to happen here, because the government is making extra sure that it doesn't. First amendment violations are simply sacrosanct, because the first amendment is the best tool of population control. There is an extremely powerful lullaby in effect: "We still have free press and if something really bad happened, the government would first have to stomp on the free press. As long as that is there, we are safe."
What I am telling you is that a total population control can be reached without affecting the free speech in any way whatsoever, which is so much worse than any chilling effect.
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And why do they do that? Because they feel safe. They feel the safety of the first amendment. "If there was something truly wrong, someone would violate the constitution and we would know..." But as long as we have freedom of speech and no fraud in the voting process, we are fine. That is the lullaby. The fact that both candidates are picked by the same guys and they agree on 90% of the important stuff and just argue about fluff, the fact that press is actually controlled by the same people who pick the ca
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Okay, I'm only sixty, but I don't actually remember a "truly independent and professional press concerned with informing the populous in an objective way". I was about fifteen when I was in a position to read about something in the paper and see it from the insiders' point of view (Mom was a teacher, and the negotiations between teachers and board got nasty), and compare the two. The media was presenting selective facts that were against the teachers, not even mentioning what the teachers considered the
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When you hit that page the large graphic makes people believe they've been directed to a potentially malicious site. They need to shrink it a bit so people that follow the link curious about what's happening don't think that they have hit the site itself.
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No, if Apple did it, it would be called 'iWatch'
I do not know how you can laugh ... (Score:4, Informative)
America has turned into a police state and you guys are laughing
I, as an American, find it very hard to swallow the hard fact that my country is no longer the Land of the Free nor Home for the Brave
With 850 Billion (and growing) dossiers to search, anyone in any of the so-called law enforcement agencies get to pry open things that they are not supposed to know, maybe even things that have been erroneously included in the dossier
... and you are laughing !!
Re:I do not know how you can laugh ... (Score:5, Insightful)
The part that has me giggling is; cops are so fucking ignorant, it's only a matter of seconds before one of their Log/Pass gets spread around long enough for anyone on the internet to D/L anyones details.
NSA is stupid for providing it
FBI is stupid for approving it
Local cops are just plain stupid.
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Re: I do not know how you can laugh ... (Score:2)
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Not sure if this is satire or not, but if you have actually used ICReach I am curious about how easy it is to get information on U.S. citizens through the databases with "minimization" etc
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Told ya... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Told ya... (Score:5, Insightful)
It never seemed stupid to anyone with even a tiny bit of knowledge about history.
Re:Told ya... (Score:4, Insightful)
I have a feeling a lot of people will be looking back at what many of them call "crazy conspiracy theory" today when some of those things turn out to be real, too.
Of course many of them really are just crazy conspiracy theory. But not all of them. Real conspiracies can exist and have existed throughout history.
But there's another thing that some people don't account for: a lot of people, operating under the same (often but not always) erroneous assumptions or misinformation, can make it look like there is a conspiracy when it's really not conspiracy at all. Just a lot of people making the same mistakes.
Re:Told ya... (Score:5, Interesting)
But there's another thing that some people don't account for: a lot of people, operating under the same (often but not always) erroneous assumptions or misinformation, can make it look like there is a conspiracy when it's really not conspiracy at all. Just a lot of people making the same mistakes.
That is a very important fact. These things happen not because of deliberate malevolence - something that only exists in movies and fairy tales - they happen because "the road to hell is paved with good intentions." The people who create these systems are too ignorant of history and human nature, too focused on catching bad guys and take their own righteousness for granted.
There is a famous quotation from Friedrich Nietzsche that goes, "He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you." It took me many years to fully grasp the depths of that aphorism, but I see it at the heart of everything that is wrong with US government's response to 9/11.
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Correction (Score:2)
That's pretty much a lie, and character assassination. There is no evidence anywhere that she "enjoyed inflicting pain on other people". The quotes attributed to her and the Slate article [slate.com] in particular (which is suspect, seeing that the article's author wrote a book "The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice" and obviously has a vested interest in drumming
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As for fucking context, she could have worked towards making opiates access easier. She didn't. And read the actual memoirs of sisters in her Homes, where 'joy' meant people screaming their lungs out from pain.
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Different AC here. If she'd said "If I had more resources, I could have alleviated more suffering," you'd be right.
Instead, sh
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And others in this thread already gave you links to her exact words praising suffering.
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I'm not sure if it's the whole episode but here's a link. [youtu.be]
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On principle, strong painkillers are even in hard cases not given. According to Mother Teresa's bizarre philosophy, it is "the most beautiful gift for a person that he can participate in the sufferings of Christ". Once she tried to comfort a screaming sufferer: "You are suffering, that means Jesus is kissing you!" The man got furious and screamed back: "Then tell your Jesus to stop kissing."
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Basically every study that tries to look into the matters in deta
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It depends on the means.
And their means are evil. Way to miss the point.
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Also, this pursuit of power *over the populace* is evil.
Re:Told ya... (Score:5, Insightful)
It never seemed stupid to anyone with even a tiny bit of knowledge about history.
Oh come on. I know a guy with that same attitude at work. You're normalizing the situation with this nonsense fantasy that you knew all along. You didn't know all along... you worried about it, you feared for it, but you didn't know Now you do, and you should be surprised... shocked... outraged... But to sit back in your lazyboy, burp, and say "yea, I figured!" is freaking ridiculous. Write you God damned congressman. Get a picket sign. The house is on fire, just because you told the kids not to play with matches doesn't mean you don't need to grab a bucket now.
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You didn't know all along... you worried about it, you feared for it, but you didn't know Now you do
This isn't the first time the NSA has done something like this. When the Patriot Act came around, and even before that, anyone with a brain knew that they were at least spying on citizens. If you give the government the power to collect all this information on people, that's what it's going to do. Plus, there were news stories long before Snowden that dispelled all doubts. What I did not know was the details of the programs, and that was what information Snowden provided.
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The existence of the slippery slope was just too obvious. Again, we have all the government abuses throughout history to attest to that.
Re:Told ya... (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course no one would guess what the NSA is 'really' up to by providing this database. The NSA are creating another database, who searches what when. They are tracking every search, who did it, how it associates with other searches made by that person over time. Nothing like being able to extort the guys with guns in uniforms or which county mounties to feed to the feds, or which feds to gain control of. Using this NSA database would have to be a seriously dangerous thing, best left to an assigned clerical officer to conduct all the searches prepare a report and thus obfuscate the nature of the individual searches. The database is bait and also a means by which to attempt to legitimate criminal acts, the initial with out warrant invasion of privacy.
Just to remind people what privacy really is all about. Slaves have none, no privacy of person, all of their body was accessible to their master for what ever abuse their master was inclined too, the slave had no right to private property and the slave had no right to private thought or expression. Privacy is all about ceasing to be a slave, a right to privacy of person, privacy of possessions and privacy of thought. The more rights to privacy you lose the more you become a slave. The more they take, the more they will want to take, until you are fully enslaved. That is the real reason to fight for as much privacy as possible to keep the threat of slavery as distant as possible.
What say the people on the inside? (Score:3)
Which raises an interesting question- how do those people working for the NSA and other intel agencies reconcile their conscience with the work that they are doing? All these systems etc need operatives to run, to gather information, to decrypt and a
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Decentralization. It's not like the people supplying the data get to directly see how it's used. I'm sure plenty of them aren't even aware of just who they're supplying data to. And the people compiling the data don't necessarily know where it comes from or what the output will be used for.
You can guess an awful lot, but hindsight is 20/20 and all that.
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Thanks to Snowden's leaks we know that NSA employees do have concerns about what they are doing, but as ever the chain of command and "everyone else is doing it too" seems to be enough. Well, for everyone except Snowden and maybe a few others.
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Grab a bucket and do what? Using your fire/bucket analogy, it's a multi-alarm raging inferno billed as a "fire fighter training exercise" to give them practice should a "real" fire happen in the future. The Congresscritters are the government officials that signed off on the approval to run the training opportunity. There's no am
Yes we knew (Score:2)
You didn't know all along... you worried about it, you feared for it, but you didn't know
Only retarded idiots like yourself do not KNOW the inevitable will occur.
It affects all other choices you make, which is sad for you.
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It never seemed stupid to anyone with even a tiny bit of knowledge about history.
Write you God damned congressman. Get a picket sign. The house is on fire, just because you told the kids not to play with matches doesn't mean you don't need to grab a bucket now.
Why do people continue to perpetuate the myth that writing to* your Congressman will actually have any effect on their decisions? First off, if your letter is read by a human, it is most certainly not your Conressman who reads it, it is a staffer. Second, their decisions are negotiated and paid for by the system of Lobbying that is prevalent throughout the US government.
Even voting wont make a real difference, there are only two Parties to choose from, and they are not much different from each other at the
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The government doesn't need to ban guns in order to oppress the populace, because the people with guns don't seem to be doing shit about all these constitutional violations anyway. Some (not all) even support this nonsense in the name of fighting "terrorism." I guess the 2nd amendment is the only thing that matters to some of them.
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True that, I remember the stores at that time and they were pretty much empty... :)
writs of assistance (Score:2)
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Slippery Slope is just something everybody should ban from use or simply learn what it is before bringing it up. Parent is correct to cite one when bringing it up. Skipping steps in the chain is invalid logic; however, people should be allowed to summarize and imply in an online posting and not create a long detailed formal syllogism every time they want to gloat... Besides:
As far as characterizations and predictions; that stuff is never logical. If you want to stick to deductive logic (real logic) then you
Re:Told ya... (Score:5, Insightful)
So all that "slippery slope" shit from 10 years ago doesn't seem so stupid now, does it?
The biggest lesson learned is that when Congress passes a law, to kill a program like Total Information Awareness, all NSA will do is change code-names and reassign the workers to a different team.
When NSA says "we have not done X in program Y", it means they have done X in program Z. When it says it has not conducted illegal activity under Authority Z, it has done it anyway, under some other contrived interpretation of a different authority.
To quote Robin Koerner on every new NSA disclosure: "Of course they did."
Now then, who thinks we still live in a functional Republic?
Apologies from a former denier... (Score:2)
So all that "slippery slope" shit from 10 years ago doesn't seem so stupid now, does it?
As one of those sheep 10 years ago.. I would like to apologizes.
After Snowden my view of US intelligence efforts changed dramatically.
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The countless abuses of government power throughout history, and simple, observable human nature, should have made it plainly obvious that giving the government that much power was a awful idea. Furthermore, we're supposed to be "the land of the free and the home of the brave," and our country was founded on a distrust of government, which is another reason for all the limitations we place upon it. I cannot even fathom how anyone would not understand this.
It's not that they just shrugged it off; it's that t
Heads should roll (Score:2)
I could almost accept that the CIA keeps this data to help with "foreign intelligence" in mind but if this data is available to both the FBI and DEA it is a clear violation of the CIA charter and should result with the director's head on the chopping block.
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Wrong agency - CIA and NSA are different agencies with (somewhat) different missions.
That said, the entire NSA, and along with anyone who enabled them, needs to fired / jailed / etc for blatant and unending violations of the Bill of Rights and federal law in general.
They're all the same... (Score:4, Insightful)
They are the modern Gestapo; Orwell just missed it by a few years.
The future will be the image from the book:
A Boot, Stamping on a Face, Forever.
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Yes. The CIA performs the "wet work".
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Re:Heads should roll (Score:4, Insightful)
They're probably utterly ignorant of history, and can't come to simple conclusions on their own. Even someone who is ignorant of history should know that those with massive amounts of power will abuse it.
"Land of the free, home of the brave," huh? Not while most of the population is either apathetic or supports massive violations of the constitution and people's fundamental liberties.
Working backwards from a "known" result (Score:5, Insightful)
Our worst fears are now realized.
The Snowden revelations regarding ubiquitous data collection have caused so little civil turmoil that the information is now to be shared with every Sheriff's Department from Bangor to the Bay Area.
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http://www.dw.de/binney-the-ns... [www.dw.de]
"When you do the things that they do - dictionary select, like a Google query, you throw a bunch of words in and get a return. And if you do that for terrorism, you get everything in the haystack that has those words. So now you're buried - by orders of magnitude worse than you used to be. So you don't find them."
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I find it interesting your choice of cities... you must be North Cal
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No. Vertexan.
From Ethan Allen to the oil field.
Re:Working backwards from a "known" result (Score:5, Insightful)
The media has never been critical of a liberal administration.
Because there hasn't been one in living memory.
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Americans tend to think that "liberal" means "liberal, as in beer," and not "liberal, as in libre."
Time for 850 billion FoI requests (Score:1)
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I want to see every record that they have.
Sorry, National Security exemption.....
as i've said before.... (Score:5, Insightful)
If you have voted for a republican or a democrat in the last 30 years or so, this is your fault.
YOU.
The signs were all there, you ignored them, and kept voting the same jokers in, perpetuating the same power structures, letting the same people get away with gross violations of the law that would get any one of us thrown in prison.
Now, welcome to the surveillance state. I hope you're happy with the results. But it gets better. It doesn't end here. We've seen, in other societies, where this goes. It doesn't end well.
But you don't care about that, do you? Because Emmy Awards! Because Jellyfish stung 250 people in one day!
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Do you really think voting for a third party, or refusing to vote, makes any difference?
If nothing you do makes any difference, is it really your fault? There might have been something that would have made a difference, but voting isn't on that list. That became quite clear when they refused to even count the votes for Pat Paulson. (I suspect he would have won, but there's no way to tell.)
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You've got it. The plurality wins system of voting is a near guarantee of only two parties, too. But those in power have no interest in reforming it.
Request: Do the math, please! (Score:1)
Every story I've seen like this, for the past couple of years, I always wonder about the cost. I don't work at the large-scale when it comes to IT, so I never know what those sorts of budgets and cost infrastructures ramp up to. Can someone who DOES do that, chime in here?!?
I'm genuinely curious, and interested. What would the math look like on this?
What requirements, from bare metal to user interface, JUST for this system, are we talking about here!
Figure every FBI, DEA and 'above' Federal enforcement/inte
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Posting anon (I hope) But I work with data on sort of this scale.
I've got about 1 petabyte of data, 5 billion records, saved for 7 years.
It takes a team of 5 DBAs to keep the database working (patching, reorgs, dumping the 7 year +1 month data, idiot developers causing SQL deadlocks, etc)
About 50 people are required to deal with new feature requests, performance tuning, hardware failures, fuckups, etc,
850 billions records, if they were each 1 byte is 850 gb.
If they were on the size of my records, 170 petaby
Re:Request: Do the math, please! (Score:5, Informative)
http://arstechnica.com/tech-po... [arstechnica.com] Sept 4 2013
".... to place its employees in drug-fighting units around the country. Those employees sit alongside Drug Enforcement Administration agents and local detectives and supply them with the phone data from as far back as 1987.""
Thats just one tiny project with once set of data.
Water news http://arstechnica.com/tech-po... [arstechnica.com]
Power news http://www.zerohedge.com/news/... [zerohedge.com]
Thats just for one classic storage site thats in the news a lot.
Re So what would it really take to put this sort of thing together?
"The ultimate goal of the NSA is total population control" 11 July 2014
http://www.theguardian.com/com... [theguardian.com]
"At least 80% of all audio calls, not just metadata, are recorded and stored in the US, says whistleblower William Binney – that's a 'totalitarian mentality'"
Should give an average reader an idea of the US internal scale to store, track, index, search, voice print, call to, call from, other numbers, work back from hops surrounding people of interest.
ie well funded, all of the USA, over years, aspects of calls stored for years ready to be found in storage if seen at a protest, near a protest or near a person who was near a person at a protest.
ie you just need a lot of tame Room 641A like access https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Water and power usage at one site thats in the news is about all that can be worked back from.
"‘Black budget’ summary details U.S. spy network’s successes, failures and objectives" (August 29, 2013)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/... [washingtonpost.com]
hints at "$52.6 billion “black budget” for fiscal 2013" but that could be for very limited number for US
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guestimate 1 trillion records, perhaps 10kb compressed each (lets say they're long wide records with textual info, etc.), that's 10k terabytes. Imagine a rack holding say 200 drives, each average 5T that's about 10 racks---or about the size of a small sized data center. With some hashing and/or partitioning scheme, the software to search all that in parallel isn't that complicated (or install something like Pivotal on it). Limitations would include non-equality joins.
the actual data center would likely be s
It's not "parallel construction" (Score:1)
However, questions have been raised over its potential for abuse in what is known as "parallel construction," a process in which agencies use surveillance resources in domestic investigations, and then later cover it up by creating a different evidence trail to use in court.
In any legitimate court this is known as perjury. Unfortunately, most US courts look the other way if it is law enforcement or government officials doing the lying.
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I thought there was an exemption for "inevitable discovery". Improperly collected evidence can be admissible if it would have been discovered anyway, by other means. Although I think the exemption only covers misdemeanor action, not perjury and so forth.
To a certain extent, this is true. However I believe (obligatory I am not a lawyer disclaimer) that inevitable discovery does not apply in cases of a "fishing" expedition, since there is no crime under investigation until AFTER incriminating data was discovered by trolling the NSA's "secret" database. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruit_of_the_poison_tree
Who didn't see this coming? (Score:1)
This is how it always plays out with law enforcement, once the Data is there, it'll get in the hands of everyday officers. Thankful they can be trusted not to abuse the system, because it is rife for abuse.
Search for me but not for thee (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh sure they have a wonderful system for searching what they want to search and can't be troubled to search what they should be able to but don't want to..
http://www.judicialwatch.org/p... [judicialwatch.org]
"Department of Justice attorneys for the Internal Revenue Service told Judicial Watch on Friday that Lois Lerner’s emails, indeed all government computer records, are backed up by the federal government in case of a government-wide catastrophe. The Obama administration attorneys said that this back-up system would be too onerous to search. "
The saying "Laws are for the little people" used to be funny, now, not so much.
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The saying "Laws are for the little people" used to be funny, now, not so much.
Was only ever funny if you still had your eyes closed. OTOH, it *is* getting worse.
IPFREELY! (Score:1)
When it comes to subversion, it is more important to watch and monitor those in power, correct?
So, the government should be doing this too all their own damn employees, aka preventing and monitoring people like Snowden and Co.
So, I for one, call for the government Implant Program For Researching Eavesdropping on Employee Logistics for You, IPFREELY will revolutionize government because we the people will know which asswipe and asshole needs to have their butt kicked out of the government and put into prison
Parallel BS (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Parallel BS (Score:4, Insightful)
If the NSA hears about a delivery of 500 Kilos of drugs and they intercept it, I'm fine with that
I'm not. The NSA should have nothing to do with drugs, and shouldn't be collecting all this 'metadata' on people in the first place.
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admission of guilt? (Score:4, Interesting)
The NSA is supposed to only collect information on foreigners. Right? So how could their DB be of any use to domestic law enforcement? Or perhaps I'm a little naive.
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Why do we accept this argument that they must have and abuse the haystack so that they can find the needle? It was discredited the day that it became known. Now what we have is a completely corruption of our justice system.
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Google-like? (Score:5, Funny)
A "Google-like" search engine? Does that mean they are serving ads to the law enforcement agencies that use it?
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A "Google-like" search engine? Does that mean they are serving ads to the law enforcement agencies that use it?
I don't know, but I wonder if they honor DMCA takedown requests....
We The People (Score:5, Insightful)
We The People need to take our government back. Our leaders have failed us, our politicians have failed up. Time for them to be removed and place. The NSA needs to be removed and dismantled in it's current form.
Our government is the terrorist problem, as it refuses to obey the constitution and puts corporations over the people.
I am not saying we need to do this violently, but we have to do this, no matter how it goes down. Our government won't fix itself, it's up to WE THE PEOPLE.
First Link in Article Bullshit (Score:2)
And here we go ... (Score:5, Insightful)
When they start these things, they say "oh, this will only be used for this, under strict controls and nothing else".
People who say that they'll eventually abuse it are dismissed as ridiculous, but then eventually since they have all of this information they might as well use it for something.
And if they have to lie about how they did it to conceal what they have, so be it. Because, after, they're the good guys, right?
This is a complete and utter undermining of the fourth amendment and the notion that a just government doesn't spy on you "just in case".
The US has been transformed into a police state. Worse, they've helped turn the rest of the world into one too.
Congratulations, America, you've pretty much killed off free societies around the world, and brought in your own special kind of fascism.
Your spy agencies and law enforcement are truly living up to all of the scary imagery people have been decrying for years.
Papers please, comrade. If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear.
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Whenever a controversial law is proposed, and its supporters, when confronted with an egregious abuse it would permit, use a phrase along the lines of 'Perhaps in theory, but the law would never be applied in that way' - they're lying. They intend to use the law that way as early and as often as possible.
- Meringuoid's Law [slashdot.org], first
FTFA (Score:2)
The unit of the DEA that distributes the information is called the Special Operations Division, or SOD. Two dozen partner agencies comprise the unit, including the FBI, CIA, NSA, Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Homeland Security. It was created in 1994 to combat Latin American drug cartels and has grown from several dozen employees to several hundred.
SO the FBI, CIA, NSA, IRS, and DHS all work together to stop drug [wikipedia.org] trafficers [cfr.org]. There's a conspiracy theory if I ever saw one...
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