Former NSA Whistleblower Bill Binney: The NSA Is Making Itself Dysfunctional With Too Much Data
from the analysis-paralysis dept
Former NSA whistleblower Bill Binney has been making the interview rounds in the wake of the NSA surveillance leaks, adding some useful context and history to some of the allegations. In one interview, with the Daily Caller, almost as an aside, he makes a really good point about how in the desire to collect all these haystacks of information, the NSA is missing out on a lot of needles. There's a discussion of how law enforcement apparently has a recording of a phone call between one of the Boston Marathon bombers, Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his wife, but that nothing was done with it. Binney points out that, when you have that much data, important stuff gets lost.They're making themselves dysfunctional by collecting all of this data. They've got so much collection capability but they can't do everything. They're probably getting something on the order of 80 percent of what goes up on the network. So they're going into the telecoms who have recorded all of the material that has gone across the network. And the telecoms keep a record of it for I think about a year. They're asking the telecoms for all the data so they can fill in the gaps. So between the two sources of what they've collected, they get the whole picture.Yes, it may be useful in hindsight (not that useful automatically makes it legal), but what would be even more useful is if they stopped focusing so much on collecting data, and went back to doing traditional investigative work that focuses on real targets. Piling on to the haystack doesn't help anyone. It comes from the faulty belief that piling more data on top -- even if it's useless data -- must be a good thing.
They can do textual processing at a rate of about 10 gigabits a second. What that means is about a million and a quarter 1,000-character emails a second. They've got something like 10 to 20 sites for this around the United States. So you can really see why they need to build something like Utah to store all of this stuff. But the basic problem is they can't figure out what they have, so they store it all in the hope that down the road they might figure something out and they can go back and figure out what's happening and what people did. It's retroactive analysis.
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Filed Under: bill binney, nsa, nsa surveillance
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hoarders
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Re: hoarders
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Re: hoarders
I belive the record holder for the number of dead cats found is 13...
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Biden in 2006 debates Obama in 2013
When do we bring out the guillotine?
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Haystacks and other missions
The 'haystacks' purpose is to be a time machine so they can go back to last year and figure out who you were talking to then, once they decide 'now' that you're suspicious.
Different purposes. And frankly you can do both at the same time as long as you aren't trying to monitor the haystacks in real time, but use more traditional methods for ongoing investigations.
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Furthermore, it's been well established they had all the information they needed to stop the 9/11 attacks, but nobody shared enough or connected enough dots. Nor did this massive mound of data do anything to stop the Boston bombing. I fail to see how adding billions of random and useless dots is going to make connecting the relevant dots easier when they couldn't do it in the first place.
Sorry, but trading 50% of one's freedom for maybe a 1% increase on safety is simply not a practical or prudent business decision.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhMkYF7hvYY
Run away! Run away! Never discuss! Never build up! Always tear down! Always hate! Always FUD!
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Preserve and expand the organization
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Metadata calculations
(Don't bother if you're scared of math or think matrix multiplication is witchcraft.)
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[...] any assurance to US citizens that the NSA will not gather and archive their data is suspect. The �Five Eyes� alliance between the intelligence agencies of the US, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the UK effectively permits those governments to circumvent the prohibition against gathering data on their own citizens by sharing information across the Five Eyes intelligence community. The UK for example can spy on Americans and make that information available to the US government on its massive spy cloud � one that the NSA operates and the Five Eyes share. [...]
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There was a DHS "training exercise" planned to be put into effect that was supposed to be the EXACT same scenario, but somehow these brothers beat them to the punch. Funny how that is, isn't it?
I have some expertise in this matter. I am supposed to be framed because of something innocent that happened to me about 20 years ago. I am not the first. I will not be the last.
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Operation Urban Shield
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Traffic Analysis
Backing up about 25 - 30 years, relatively few people communicated with regularly with someone in a foreign country. Problems with cost, time zones, and the lack of any foreign contacts were the primary reasons. So traffic analysis of international phone calls was relatively easy to do. The networks were simpler and only a few had to be monitored. In this era the vast majority of the traffic was no interest to the spooks.
Today with social media especially it is quite possible for people to communicate with others worldwide. Compounding this is how easy it is for one to set an informational website to post instructions about doing whatever. The spooks in many ways appear to operating with a 1980 mentality. Thus, they assume they must monitor all the communication links. This will lead to them drowning in data because even a higher percentage of the traffic is inconsequential - as Jay Leno quipped "90% was ordering pizzas".
The better procedure requires more work initially. That is to identify the websites and primary "command" nodes involved and monitor them. The identification will be harder but once done it can be assumed that a very high percentage of the traffic is from the terrorist or criminals.
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Brainwave overload
Karma's a bitch!
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Tips on terrorism by concerned Americans are Ignored
It does not make sense that so much data is collected if it is not utilized to prevent, such as the recent attack in Boston's marathon. It concerns me because I am aware of the increasing pattern of abductions and kidnappings in the US, and I would not be surprised if there are thugs in the NSA who utilize the data for human trafficking purposes.
There was a terrorist in Freddie Prinze, Sr.'s soup and there is a terrorist in the soup of all Americans. "Ms. Quixote Goes Country - Raised on the Marxist Frontier", a novel written by a concerned American.
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