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they know what you are doing
sky otter:
??? ??? ??? >:(
did you really think there was any privacy left?
Series: Glenn Greenwald on security and libertyPrevious | Index Boundless Informant: the NSA's secret tool to track global surveillance dataRevealed: The NSA's powerful tool for cataloguing global surveillance data – including figures on US collection
l Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 9 June 2013 10.08 EDT
at the link you can enlarge areas
The color scheme ranges from green (least subjected to surveillance) through yellow and orange to red (most surveillance). Note the '2007' date in the image relates to the document from which the interactive map derives its top secret classification, not to the map itself.
The National Security Agency has developed a powerful tool for recording and analysing where its intelligence comes from, raising questions about its repeated assurances to Congress that it cannot keep track of all the surveillance it performs on American communications.
The Guardian has acquired top-secret documents about the NSA datamining tool, called Boundless Informant, that details and even maps by country the voluminous amount of information it collects from computer and telephone networks.
The focus of the internal NSA tool is on counting and categorizing the records of communications, known as metadata, rather than the content of an email or instant message.
The Boundless Informant documents show the agency collecting almost 3 billion pieces of intelligence from US computer networks over a 30-day period ending in March 2013. One document says it is designed to give NSA officials answers to questions like, "What type of coverage do we have on country X" in "near real-time by asking the SIGINT [signals intelligence] infrastructure."
An NSA factsheet about the program, acquired by the Guardian, says: "The tool allows users to select a country on a map and view the metadata volume and select details about the collections against that country."
Under the heading "Sample use cases", the factsheet also states the tool shows information including: "How many records (and what type) are collected against a particular country."
A snapshot of the Boundless Informant data, contained in a top secret NSA "global heat map" seen by the Guardian, shows that in March 2013 the agency collected 97bn pieces of intelligence from computer networks worldwide.
The heat map reveals how much data is being collected from around the world. Note the '2007' date in the image relates to the document from which the interactive map derives its top secret classification, not to the map itself. Iran was the country where the largest amount of intelligence was gathered, with more than 14bn reports in that period, followed by 13.5bn from Pakistan. Jordan, one of America's closest Arab allies, came third with 12.7bn, Egypt fourth with 7.6bn and India fifth with 6.3bn.
The heatmap gives each nation a color code based on how extensively it is subjected to NSA surveillance. The color scheme ranges from green (least subjected to surveillance) through yellow and orange to red (most surveillance).
The disclosure of the internal Boundless Informant system comes amid a struggle between the NSA and its overseers in the Senate over whether it can track the intelligence it collects on American communications. The NSA's position is that it is not technologically feasible to do so.
At a hearing of the Senate intelligence committee In March this year, Democratic senator Ron Wyden asked James Clapper, the director of national intelligence: "Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?"
"No sir," replied Clapper.
Judith Emmel, an NSA spokeswoman, told the Guardian in a response to the latest disclosures: "NSA has consistently reported – including to Congress – that we do not have the ability to determine with certainty the identity or location of all communicants within a given communication. That remains the case."
Other documents seen by the Guardian further demonstrate that the NSA does in fact break down its surveillance intercepts which could allow the agency to determine how many of them are from the US. The level of detail includes individual IP addresses.
IP address is not a perfect proxy for someone's physical location but it is rather close, said Chris Soghoian, the principal technologist with the Speech Privacy and Technology Project of the American Civil Liberties Union. "If you don't take steps to hide it, the IP address provided by your internet provider will certainly tell you what country, state and, typically, city you are in," Soghoian said.
That approximation has implications for the ongoing oversight battle between the intelligence agencies and Congress.
On Friday, in his first public response to the Guardian's disclosures this week on NSA surveillance, Barack Obama said that that congressional oversight was the American peoples' best guarantee that they were not being spied on.
"These are the folks you all vote for as your representatives in Congress and they are being fully briefed on these programs," he said. Obama also insisted that any surveillance was "very narrowly circumscribed".
Senators have expressed their frustration at the NSA's refusal to supply statistics. In a letter to NSA director General Keith Alexander in October last year, senator Wyden and his Democratic colleague on the Senate intelligence committee, Mark Udall, noted that "the intelligence community has stated repeatedly that it is not possible to provide even a rough estimate of how many American communications have been collected under the Fisa Amendments Act, and has even declined to estimate the scale of this collection."
At a congressional hearing in March last year, Alexander denied point-blank that the agency had the figures on how many Americans had their electronic communications collected or reviewed. Asked if he had the capability to get them, Alexander said: "No. No. We do not have the technical insights in the United States." He added that "nor do we do have the equipment in the United States to actually collect that kind of information".
Soon after, the NSA, through the inspector general of the overall US intelligence community, told the senators that making such a determination would jeopardize US intelligence operations – and might itself violate Americans' privacy.
"All that senator Udall and I are asking for is a ballpark estimate of how many Americans have been monitored under this law, and it is disappointing that the inspectors general cannot provide it," Wyden told Wired magazine at the time.
The documents show that the team responsible for Boundless Informant assured its bosses that the tool is on track for upgrades.
The team will "accept user requests for additional functionality or enhancements," according to the FAQ acquired by the Guardian. "Users are also allowed to vote on which functionality or enhancements are most important to them (as well as add comments). The BOUNDLESSINFORMANT team will periodically review all requests and triage according to level of effort (Easy, Medium, Hard) and mission impact (High, Medium, Low)."
Emmel, the NSA spokeswoman, told the Guardian: "Current technology simply does not permit us to positively identify all of the persons or locations associated with a given communication (for example, it may be possible to say with certainty that a communication traversed a particular path within the internet. It is harder to know the ultimate source or destination, or more particularly the identity of the person represented by the TO:, FROM: or CC: field of an e-mail address or the abstraction of an IP address).
"Thus, we apply rigorous training and technological advancements to combine both our automated and manual (human) processes to characterize communications – ensuring protection of the privacy rights of the American people. This is not just our judgment, but that of the relevant inspectors general, who have also reported this."
She added: "The continued publication of these allegations about highly classified issues, and other information taken out of context, makes it impossible to conduct a reasonable discussion on the merits of these programs."
Additional reporting: James Ball in New York and Spencer Ackerman in Washington
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/08/nsa-boundless-informant-global-datamining
sky otter:
it enough to make you go back to using the land lines.. :'( >:(
just a few articles on the tech page at huff post here
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tech/
What Is PalTalk? Video Chat Service Among Facebook, Google And Other Big Names Being Spied On
The Huffington Post | By Alexis Kleinman Posted: 06/07/2013 1:18 pm EDT | Updated: 06/07/2013 1:56 pm EDT
Late Thursday, major reports from The Washington Post and The Guardian revealed that the U.S. government is collecting data from nine of the biggest Internet companies in the country. The list of firms is composed of nearly all household names -- Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple -- in addition to one lesser-known company: PalTalk.
So what exactly is PalTalk, and why is the government interested in accessing its servers along with those of the Silicon Valley bigwigs?
NSA Spying: Whistleblowers Claim Vindication On Surveillance State Warnings
Posted: 06/06/2013 8:30 pm EDT | Updated: 06/06/2013 9:19 pm EDT
For years, four former National Security Agency analysts warned that the government was conducting widespread surveillance on domestic communications. Their warnings were largely ignored.
But on Thursday, after The Guardian newspaper reported that Verizon was turning over customer phone records to the intelligence agency as part of a secret court order, Kirk Wiebe had a “feeling of great gratification.”
“What we've been saying all along has proven to be so," the 68-year-old whistleblower told The Huffington Post. "Our worst fears are being realized.”
While at the NSA, Wiebe, along with Ed Loomis and Bill Binney, created a computer program that could isolate large amounts of information collected by the NSA while protecting Americans’ privacy. But the NSA ignored their program, saying “it was too invasive,” Loomis said.
"We had a solution to this entire problem that would have avoided this whole mess," Wiebe said.
Obama Cyber Memo Is Just The Latest Sign That The U.S. Is Preparing For Cyberwar
The Huffington Post | By Gerry Smith Posted: 06/07/2013 5:43 pm EDT | Updated: 06/07/2013 6:07 pm EDT
.A top-secret presidential memo published Friday marked the latest sign that the Obama administration is ready to go on the offensive in a potential cyberwar.
On Friday, the Guardian published a secret presidential directive calling on national security and intelligence officials to create a list of potential foreign targets for U.S. cyber attacks. The 18-page document, known as Presidential Policy Directive 20, aims "to put in place tools and a framework to enable government to make decisions" on cyber actions, a senior administration official told the Guardian.
The directive states that cyber attacks can be launched as part of "anticipatory action taken against imminent threats," but should comply with U.S. and international law and receive approval from the president if they are "reasonably likely to result in significant consequences," according to the Guardian.
forgot this one....
Internet Shrugs Off NSA Data Mining: People 'Numb To The Fact That They're Being Watched'
Posted: 06/07/2013 7:06 pm EDT | Updated: 06/07/2013 9:08 pm EDT
one more..different source
http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/facebook-forensics-what-feds-can-learn-your-digital-crumbs-6C10240840?ocid=msnhp&pos=5
Facebook forensics? What the feds can learn from your digital crumbs
Bits of you are all over the Internet. If you've signed into Google and searched, saved a file in your Dropbox folder, made a phone call using Skype, or just woken up in the morning and checked your email, you're leaving a trail of digital crumbs. People who have access to this information — companies powering your emails and Web searches, advertisers who are strategically directing ads at you — can build a picture of who you are, what you like, and what you will probably do next. Revelations about government counter-terrorism programs such as PRISM indicate that federal agents and other operatives may use this data, too.
and no one will yell real loud because they don't think it will matter
untill years down the road when we will wonder..
how the hell did we get here...
sigh
Ellirium113:
People are complacent in letting the government trample on them so long as they think it is for the greater good.
Gigas:
Indeed they do............
The latest uncovered snoop tattle tale is called finspy or finfisher by a UK firm called gamma international ltd.
Government security officials were told it could be covertly installed on suspects' computers through exploiting security lapses in the update procedures of non-suspect software. They piggy backed it on mozilla firefox as some plugin using firefix credentials so anti-virus would not tag it suspicious when scanned.
Mozilla sent a cease and desist letter to Gamma to stop them from using firefox as a delivery system since it was found they integrate the trojan parasite in as a product of mozilla upon an update.
Anti-virus software developers have attempted to identify this bugger since previous anti-virus scans fail to detect it.
This thing was found by dissidents who ransacked the egyptian office of secret police and they found a contract for a license to run this software from gamma international ltd.
They now can see you by your wi fi as well. It is claimed the wi fi tells them where you are, what room and your movements. This is creepy but hey, we all now have smart appliances tellin them all about us.
Just a thing about smart appliances. My sister bought a smart washer and dryer. When we talk on the phone and she walks by the washer and dryer, the phone breaks up and her conversation chops so bad I cannot hear what she is saying.
Gigas:
I forgot to ad this so want to take the opportunity to ratchet another post number to my profile, anyway.
That same sister who has the smart appliances, had the gas company out a few weeks ago. I went out to look over and see what the guy was doing and he had an extremely large wrench in hand as he walked back to his truck and tossed it in with a big bang.
I walk over look at her gas meter to see if I can detect what he was doing. I see nothing new added so she comes out and I ask, what was the gas guy doing. She says he showed up cause there was a gas leak. I go, how did he know that and she says I don't know.
Not saying he did anything nefarious but I did see soapy suds around a fitting but how did the gas guy and company know there was a leak way out here in the country.
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