General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsThe NSA is building a massive data center in Utah to read every email you'll ever send.
Many of us are aware that little of what we say on social networks is really private. But you'd think your emails would be safe from prying eyes especially those of your government. Not so, once the government completes work on a top-secret Utah data center reportedly built to spy on civilian communications.
The $2 billion facility, slated to be complete by September 2013, is allegedly designed to be able to filter through yottabytes (10^24 bytes) of data. Put into perspective, that's greater than the estimated total of all human knowledge since the dawn of mankind. If leaked information about the complex is correct, nothing will be safe from the facility's reach, from cell phone communications to emails to what you just bought with your credit card. And encryption won't protect you one of the facility's priorities is breaking even the most complex of codes.
The good news (if there is any) is that the sheer volume of internet traffic and emails sent in a single day is far too much to be read by human eyes. Instead, the government will likely need to rely on complicated algorithms to assess each transmission and decide if they represent a security threat. So you're probably out of the government's earshot here... as long as you watch what you say.
more ways at the link:
The FBI maintains detailed files on numerous public, semi-public, and private figures.
Homeland Security is reading your tweets and Facebook status messages.
Your ISP may soon be required to keep files on what sites you visit.
http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/technology-blog/4-high-tech-ways-federal-government-spying-private-153556125.html
fascisthunter
(29,381 posts)tanyev
(42,669 posts)Generic Other
(28,979 posts)Funny!!
aquart
(69,014 posts)cynatnite
(31,011 posts)jp11
(2,104 posts)white_wolf
(6,238 posts)KG
(28,753 posts)about.
IDemo
(16,926 posts)he rolled his eyes and went immediately to Snopes.
Initech
(100,139 posts)You really want to trim our deficits? Why don't we eliminate like 2/3 of the money we spend on defense every year - it's more like an extra 2 or three times what the rest of the world spends!! This is completely absurd - almost as much as those damn pat downs we have to endure at the airport.
Auggie
(31,230 posts)For example, instead of typing the word "bomb," I'd type "cupcake."
Agony
(2,605 posts)I mean... "set the cupcake under the north tower"? come on! why would a normal patriot say that?
Auggie
(31,230 posts)sheesh!
whatchamacallit
(15,558 posts)Are we really just a nation of stupid assholes, who will let the government do whatever the fuck they want as long it's framed as "protection from terror"?
PufPuf23
(8,854 posts)whatchamacallit
(15,558 posts)And many DUers can't understand why some of us aren't all fired up for the election.
Selatius
(20,441 posts)An ignorant populace is as much an agent of tyranny as any charismatic type A personality with sights set on war, conquest, and control of everybody.
Generic Other
(28,979 posts)The least they could do.
Autumn
(45,120 posts)or just stay offline.
KG
(28,753 posts)IDemo
(16,926 posts)FiveGoodMen
(20,018 posts)IDemo
(16,926 posts)Rex
(65,616 posts)NCTraveler
(30,481 posts)If this is being set up to collect information on US citizens I have a real problem with it. It should not be constitutional. If if it is for non US citizens I have no problem with it.
bluedigger
(17,090 posts)First pet's name? Check.
NCTraveler
(30,481 posts)bluedigger
(17,090 posts)NCTraveler
(30,481 posts)I am going to take this a sarcasm.
bluedigger
(17,090 posts)How do you think the government can tell the difference?
bupkus
(1,981 posts)To this Wired News article from the Ides of March 2012:
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/all/1
The NSA Is Building the Countrys Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say)
The NSA has become the largest, most covert, and potentially most intrusive intelligence agency ever.
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 worlds 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 trailsparking 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 administrationan effort that was killed by Congress in 2003 after it caused an outcry over its potential for invading Americans privacy.
But this is more than just a data center, says one senior intelligence official who until recently was involved with the program. The mammoth Bluffdale center will have another important and far more secret role that until now has gone unrevealed. It is also critical, he says, for breaking codes. And code-breaking is crucial, because much of the data that the center will handlefinancial information, stock transactions, business deals, foreign military and diplomatic secrets, legal documents, confidential personal communicationswill be heavily encrypted. According to another top official also involved with the program, the NSA made an enormous breakthrough several years ago in its ability to cryptanalyze, or break, unfathomably complex encryption systems employed by not only governments around the world but also many average computer users in the US. The upshot, according to this official: Everybodys a target; everybody with communication is a target.
For the NSA, overflowing with tens of billions of dollars in post-9/11 budget awards, the cryptanalysis breakthrough came at a time of explosive growth, in size as well as in power. Established as an arm of the Department of Defense following Pearl Harbor, with the primary purpose of preventing another surprise assault, the NSA suffered a series of humiliations in the post-Cold War years. Caught offguard by an escalating series of terrorist attacksthe first World Trade Center bombing, the blowing up of US embassies in East Africa, the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen, and finally the devastation of 9/11some began questioning the agencys very reason for being. In response, the NSA has quietly been reborn. And while there is little indication that its actual effectiveness has improvedafter all, despite numerous pieces of evidence and intelligence-gathering opportunities, it missed the near-disastrous attempted attacks by the underwear bomber on a flight to Detroit in 2009 and by the car bomber in Times Square in 2010there is no doubt that it has transformed itself into the largest, most covert, and potentially most intrusive intelligence agency ever created.
NCTraveler
(30,481 posts)bupkus
(1,981 posts)kenny blankenship
(15,689 posts)and by that simple erroneous assumption, or faulty piece of data, or unwarranted correlation, cause the government to mistakenly regard ordinary citizens as criminal or terror suspects. It could never happen that the government might populate a secret enemies list on which thousands perhaps tens of thousands of perfectly innocent people might be trapped, not knowing their "pre-suspect" status and unaware of how suspicions and ratings passed around from marketing corporation to alaphabet government security agency to credit bureau dogs their life and misshapes their destiny. People would never be scooped off the streets by unmarked vans belonging to obscure agencies and indefinitely detained in undisclosed locations, under unknown charges, fake names, and on the basis of unseen, unchallengeable evidence.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/07/anne-lenhart-cvs-arrested_n_1496927.html
When Ann Lenhart hobbled into her Dallas-area CVS pharmacy on crutches, her leg was engulfed in a large brace and she had a permanent IV line in her arm.
She was looking to fill a prescription for Norco, a powerful narcotic she'd been prescribed the previous month after shattering her kneecap while doing volunteer work in Haiti. (h/t The Consumerist)
Lenhart spent a night in the Dallas County jail while the police tried to contact her doctor, according to a local television station in Dallas Fort Worth, Texas. The following day she was released on bond and was charged with obtaining a controlled substance by fraud, CBS 11 News reported.
The police eventually dropped the charges after speaking with Lenhart's doctor, who confirmed the legitimacy of the prescription but said he never received a call from CVS. A CVS representative told CBS that the company is "investigating how this unfortunate incident occurred and we are working to resolve the matter with Ms. Lenhart."
progressoid
(50,013 posts)Yeah, that is good news.
slackmaster
(60,567 posts)Bright morning turtle running, working under blooming mesquite tree.
KCS72000
(312 posts)encrypt a file with pgp v 1.0 and the resulting scramble was encrypted with another different algorithm, how could it possibly be decrypted, since the first decryption would not yield any recognizable words.
just a thought.
slackmaster
(60,567 posts)It's a hard subject.
Odin2005
(53,521 posts)joshcryer
(62,287 posts)I thought this would be a good thing!
Turbineguy
(37,412 posts)instead of just boring.
Tierra_y_Libertad
(50,414 posts)usrname
(398 posts)and I hardly receive that many from people of interest. If NSA can kindly go through all the incoming email and get rid of the spammy kind, I would be so grateful.
longship
(40,416 posts)Let's send all our SPAM to the NSA. Maybe they'll protect us from the insidious Nigerian scam...
That, I would go for.
davidthegnome
(2,983 posts)As someone with nothing to hide, I don't really care what they read of my personal information or whether they listen in on my phone conversations. That is - I don't care if the intent really is to protect this Country. It is not what information is being viewed that concerns me as much as WHO is viewing it. Can we really count on every agent working in the facility, with access to this information... to use it for legal and honest purposes? Sure, about as much as we can count on every cop and fed to be absolutely honest, law abiding and without personal, private agenda.
This is damned dangerous. I'm not sure I like this brave new world we're living in...
Zalatix
(8,994 posts)If a million Americans do this it will melt their entire system down.
NCTraveler
(30,481 posts)How is it going forward under President Obama. He is the commander and chief.
bemildred
(90,061 posts)Or maybe they could train pigeons.
kenny blankenship
(15,689 posts)bemildred
(90,061 posts)BiggJawn
(23,051 posts)Poor fucker'll die from boredom...
woo me with science
(32,139 posts)and that the betrayals are coming only from the OTHER party.
Robb
(39,665 posts)If this could be done, at least in the manner described. wouldn't you expect it to have been done already?
Were I to be in the business of looking for terrorism in emails, I'd be sure to let everyone know how I was going to do it. Or at least how I'd prefer they think I intended to do it.
Funny business.
jakeXT
(10,575 posts)"In effect, the United States of America was turned into the equivalent of a foreign nation for the purpose of dragnet electronic surveillance, on a very wide scale."
video link
http://www.privacysos.org/node/632
Mr Dixon
(1,185 posts)EFerrari
(163,986 posts)Total Information Awareness turns out to have been a pretend start up of what they were already doing. Amy Goodman had an hourlong presentation on this last week, iirc.
Comrade Grumpy
(13,184 posts)Remember this: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
So how are they seizing my emails without a warrant or probable cause?
Mr Dixon
(1,185 posts)GeorgeGist
(25,326 posts)Snort.
BlueIris
(29,135 posts)LiberalEsto
(22,845 posts)by sending out zillions of emails every day. In other words, smother them in drivel.
sarcasmo
(23,968 posts)I think the one they did started from when you were born.
DFW
(54,502 posts)Start or end each FB message or email with Allah or some such word. It will get picked up. Then discuss Aunt Murgatroid's recipe for cream of asparagus soup, and pity the poor National "Security" case officer who is trying to figure out what the words "cream" and "asparagus" REALLY mean.
bhikkhu
(10,726 posts)imagine the boredom, imagine the boatload of daily trivial pointlessness, imagine the never-ending influx of useless stuff to go through. Pity the bastards...