NSA: Figuring Out How Many US Citizens We Illegally Spied On Would Violate Their Privacy
from the wtf dept
For quite some time now, we've been reporting on Senators Wyden and Udall's repeated attempts to get the government to explain how many American citizens the NSA spied on under the FISA Amendments Act (which is supposed to be used to spy on foreigners, but appears to have been used much more broadly). It's quite clear that Wyden and Udall, in their roles on the Senate Intelligence Committee, believe there is some information that the public needs to know about, but which is not public. So they keep asking the same basic question over and over again. As we noted last week, since most of the rest of Congress does not have this information, and yet is expected to vote on the renewal of the FISA Amendments Act, something is seriously wrong.What's never made sense is why the feds simply refuse to admit how many Americans they've spied on under the law. In the past, the Director of National Intelligence has basically told Wyden and Udall that he wouldn't answer because he didn't want to. But the latest answer really takes the insanity to stunning new levels. As initially revealed at Wired, the NSA has refused to answer claiming that, not only would it be too much work to figure it out, but that figuring it out would violate the privacy of Americans.
Yes, I'm going to repeat that, because it's insane. The NSA claims that figuring out how many Americans it spied on would violate their privacy. Here's the specific language from the letter:
The NSA IG provided a classified response on 6 June 2012. I defer to his conclusion that obtaining such an estimate was beyond the capacity of his office and dedicating sufficient additional resources would likely impede the NSA's mission. He further stated that his office and NSA leadership agreed that an IG review of the sort suggested would itself violate the privacy of U.S. persons..At this point, you have to just wonder if the NSA is flat out mocking Wyden and Udall and basically taunting them to make it clear that the NSA doesn't believe anyone has oversight powers concerning the agency. And, of course, there is the other explanation: that the NSA has spied on more or less everyone who owns a mobile phone (which has been suggested by some reports).
Either way, it certainly sounds like the NSA really doesn't care what the law actually says, so long as it gets to keep spying on people.
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Filed Under: data surveillance, fisa amendments act, marc udall, nsa, ron wyden, spying
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Sounds like FISA is busted and the NSA needs to be shutdown
You do the crime, you do the time.
Spying on Americans is a crime, tantamount to treason. If it were up to me, I'd go for death penalty.
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Business as usual.
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Re: Business as usual.
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Re: Re: Business as usual.
Not in my state, but here you can't legally shoot someone just for illegally entering your home, whether government employees or not. I think that's a good thing.
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should read 'as long as NSA gets to carry on spying on whomsoever it wants to and taking the piss out of the Senators that can cut it's funding (be bit of a stupid move, dont you think?)
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Faceplalm just doesn't cut it with this level of fail
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NSA Exempt from most US laws anyways
I know for a fact that they can legally hack into other departments of the gov't because they run the military's college cyber defense contest, since they are the only ones legally able to hack into (any branch of) the military's networks.
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Re: NSA Exempt from most US laws anyways
Secret evidence means the defendant and his lawyer don't get to see it or argue against it. I don't remember whether the judge can see the secret evidence himself.
It can take the form of "We have complete proof that the accused shot the victim in the face. We can't show it to you because National Security, but trust us, it's 100% proof".
And of course let's not forget Habeas Corpus has been repealed for people accused of terrorism, and the US government can also assassinate US citizen accused of terrorism (and has done so twice - a terror suspect as well as his teenage son who was "collateral damage").
Spying on people is pretty light in comparison.
I'm curious to see how long Americans will tolerate this. It's interesting to see as an outsider.
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This has to happen
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The NSA has spied on EXACTLY
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Above the law, maybe
If Wyden and Udall can use FUD (same tactic used by all these days) they can maybe get congress to agree the NSA has too much funding.
These are tough economic times, if agencies don't want to cooperate, simply cut their funding and blame it on debt reduction.
Once you do that, maybe then they'll find the time write a simple query to their databases to get the total, sorta like the SQL SUM function.
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Re: Above the law, maybe
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Peeping Tom: I didn't violate those women's privacy your honor, it was the prosecutors who violated it by filing a court case about it with all the names of the women in the court filings, as well as all the accusations of what I saw peeping in the door!
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Neurotic Spying Aggressors
Never Sane Association
Needlessly Stupid Airheads
Nightmarish Surveillance Addicts
Nutcase Slimeballs of America
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The U.S. Government is going to end up creating "American Terrorists" if they continue to violate the constitutional rights of the American People.
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They weren't fighting for "equal rights" or even "equal treament" they were fighting for corporation to "not be evil". Of course everyone wants this, but there is nothing concrete to be able call a victory.
It was destined to fail - and it did.
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Oh, how I wish that were true!
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If you know data, you know it makes sense
I don't know if this is the way it happens... but it makes sense to me:
If you have algorithms that basically triggers on word patterns over massive amount of streaming data, that streaming data is still "anonymous" until it triggers. Once the trigger happens, then the call is analyzed further and the details (who, who to, what, when, where, voice recognition of caller, voice recognition of receiver, etc) can be databased.
This way you're only tracking calls that matter to you, or at the very least eliminating mundane family chatter that you don't want to waste resources on. If 90% of the stream is ignored, then even though the calls have been "listened in on", it's filtered out - and the NSA doesn't have to waste its resources (which are finite) - and more to the point, what is filtered out is unknown (and mostly the NSA doesn't care about this filtered out "crap").
What you're asking the NSA to do when you want to know how many American's are spyed on, is for the NSA to go back to the stream and re-run it, this time cataloging EVERYTHING. Because the only way to get a count of callers is to know how many distinct callers there are in your stream.
Now you're forcing the NSA to actually database what hadn't been databased before. This not only provides you the number of American's spyed on, but it also has the undesired effect of creating records and tracking US Citizens, there-by violating their privacy.
Because it's not a simple matter of categorizing by phone number (more than one person uses a phone, one person uses multiple phones) there is no simple way to come up with the answer without analyzing what was filtered out.
-CF
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Re: If you know data, you know it makes sense
This is why I've been thinking, Senators Wyden and Udall should perhaps change their question.
As you may note just below your comment, I too think the NSA is alleging that collecting-but-not-reviewing is not spying. So the good Senators should find a way to say something along the lines of "how many communications have been collected?"
But then there's the many-to-many mapping that results. We have to find a way to frame the question so we can refer to the amount of data collected without requiring them to analyze it.
How many "communications"? How many phone calls? Emails?
Instead of looking for a specific value, should we just ask for an order of magnitude? For instance, between 1,000 and 10,000; between 10,000 and 100,000; 100k and 1 million; etc.
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Re: Re: If you know data, you know it makes sense
The reality is they spied indiscriminately on all Americans. The reality is that they probably don't have a clue how man American's they spied on.
-CF
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Re: If you know data, you know it makes sense
"If you know data, you know it makes sense", but on another level it makes no sense at all. Obviously then any intelligent terrorist that wants to see that their activity remains secret will disguise their conversations as mundane chatter. "I'm taking the kids to the pool around 7" can mean the bomb is in position at the bus terminal. If their language is coded into idle talk there isn't enough resources available to separate it out from the real "crap", thus this whole NSA adventure is only bound to catch the low hanging fruit. This is another area where overly automating things with algos makes us still vulnerable, and so this program is highly unproductive. Which leads one to wonder that instead of such programs existing to "make us safer", their real point is for agencies to gain more power and leverage for the sake of more power and leverage.
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Re: Re: If you know data, you know it makes sense
That's why I think instead that the data is vacuumed up and stored, where it can be reviewed by humans later. This has the added bonus of allowing this data to be mined with post-processing techniques, whose performance and efficiency will only improve in the coming years.
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Re: If you know data, you know it makes sense
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Re: Re: If you know data, you know it makes sense
"...da·ta·base (dt-bs, dt-) Computer Science
n. also data base
A collection of data arranged for ease and speed of search and retrieval. Also called data bank.
tr.v. da·ta·based, da·ta·bas·ing, da·ta·bas·es
To put (data) into a database...."
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Re: If you know data, you know it makes sense
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My guess...
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Re: My guess...
So don't look at the context and you are never breaching any privacy. If however you find some data that may be indicative of some wrongdoing you can use it to get a warrant to find out who it belongs to.
To find out who it all belonged to would break everyones privacy.
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Patrick Star...
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"How many Americans are you spying on?"
"All of them"
This might be why the senators are bashing them with such simple questions.
The best part, anyone could bring suit against them at that point.
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Since they are reading tons of random bits, they aren't so much reading a known individual's email, as much as they are scanning all emails that come over that endpoint and looking for certain patterns and phrases that are interesting to them like "dirty bomb".
So potentially for them to tell congress which Americans they have spied upon, before reading the email, they would have to first figure out who was sending and receiving and then log that person. Which would require more resources and would actually reduce privacy since instead of looking at the content they would have to identify and track the individual.
My guess, based on my opinion that most if not all congressmen are out to screw us, is that this request will basically end up in a mandate that requires the NSA to track individuals in order to build a richer DB that is more useful to the political class than simply alerting us about pending attacks.
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As other commenters have pointed out, instead of doing that they could probably satisfy the request by giving the equally technically correct answer: we spy on everybody.
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Makes me wish Canada had it's own cable to Europe and the rest of the world. Currently all international internet traffic that originates or terminates in Canada goes through the USA where the authorities can intercept and spy on it.
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surprise them...
And in fact they are probably the last group of citizens that should be supporting this. I suspect that most threats to the country originate with members of the government in one way or another. It would be great to see there faces when they realized this.
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Hmmm
In other words, he's saying it's my business, not yours, Mr. Wyden. Just vote Aye when we tell you and we'll all get along just fine.
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Once you admit to how many, someone, somewhere, wants to know how, who, and why. Suddenly the position of having no standing in court changes. Right after that, enough pressure comes on congress to do something about ending it.
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It makes sense if the NSA is recording *raw* data...
If, for instance, I merely record raw packet data on the network and do not interpret it... then I've "captured the firehose", but I don't know what I've got until I analyze it.
If I have the budget to "capture the firehose" for the entire US telephone network, but I only need to analyze 10-20K "intercepts" per year, then I probably wouldn't have the equipment or staff to evaluate the details of all the data I have.
If that's the situation, then I'd probably respond similarly to Wyden's request. In order to answer his questions I'd have to analyze ALL the data I have, which I don't have the resources or budget to do... and even if I did, it'd expose the details of all communications on the network... which would be an invasion of privacy.
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Re: It makes sense if the NSA is recording *raw* data...
The CIA, FBI and ordinary Law Enforcement aren't terribly keen about discussing their techniques in public either...
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Re: It makes sense if the NSA is recording *raw* data...
Just another example of how you can truthfully state any falsehood when you supply your own definitions of the terms.
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I agree
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"WTF"
wait ... what ?!? o_0
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ate my subject
"WTF": perfect dept.
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