Glenn Greenwald’s Fish Tale [View all]
Over the past few days, there’s been a major burst of outrage regarding the “NSA leaks” from a young tech named Edward Snowden, as published in The Guardian by Glenn Greenwald. The claims were that the NSA is monitoring every American, and that there’s a “secret” program called PRISM which enabled Snowden (among others) to wiretap into anyone’s communications. Along with that, that the government had “direct access” to all the major internet services servers. Aside from the fact that it was Greenwald publishing it, there were a number of things that Snowden and Greenwald were claiming that made me smell a distinct odor of fish.
A little personal background. I’ve been a computer geek for over 30 years, both professionally and as a hobby. I’ve worked on and with major data systems, as well as having been responsible for security. I’ve also had security clearances and had more than my share of security briefings. Which is why the initial story didn’t smell right to me. More than a little fishy, in fact.
Why? Let me explain some things. First and foremost, even without “national security,” no one gets the sort of complete access that Snowden claims he had. Things are compartmentalized. You may have access to some systems, but not others. I’ve been a systems administrator in a fairly large IT section, and from experience, while I had complete access to everything on my systems, I didn’t on other administrator’s systems. What access I did have was extremely limited, and everything was audited at some point. I can’t imagine NSA is any less compartmentalized.
Secondly, you have to understand the sheer volume of information that’s currently being sent around the Internet. We’re not talking a few gigabytes here and there, we’re talking millions of terabytes for the US, and tens of thousands of petabytes for the world. Any idea that the NSA is storing all that, let along monitoring it all, is ridiculous on its face. The sheer cost of doing so would be a significant part of the country’s budget, and the number of people necessary to do it would solve the unemployment problem in this country. That’s aside from the reality that the majority of that traffic amounts to “nothing of interest to the government.” The NSA doesn’t really care that you’re watching movies on Netflix, that you’re downloading porn, that you’re writing pithy blogs or commenting on them. They’re “meaningless” in overall terms, and keeping tabs on that is rather idiotic.
Read more: http://cendax.wordpress.com/2013/06/16/glenn-greenwalds-fish-tale/
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