On 3/5/19 6:27 PM, jim bell wrote:

https://reason.com/blog/2019/03/05/the-nsa-has-apparently-stopped-the-domes

From an article cited in the blog post referenced above: ?When the agency then fed those numbers back to the telecoms to get the communications logs of all of the people who had been in contact with its targets, it ended up gathering some data of people unconnected to the targets. The agency had no authority to collect their information, nor a practical way to go through its large database and cull those records it should not have gathered. As a result, it decided to purge them all and start over." https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/04/us/politics/nsa-phone-records-program-shu... So... if this presents an accurate account of the NSA's statements, the NSA has very obviously lied. No "practical way to go through its large database and cull those records it should not have gathered"? When in fact, a single query based on the unique identifiers of "authorized" collection targets could grind through those records and delete all that did not include such an identifier in any of the fields. Granted, that might have taken weeks to set up and test and days to run against the 'live' data, costing thousands of dollars worth of burn rate: But that constitutes FAR less than the proverbial drop in the bucket, relative to NSA's staff, technology and budget resources. An operation purging all but "contacts of contacts" would have taken an order of magnitude longer, and so forth with 3rd hand contacts, etc. But IF that database was of any potential use at all for targeting people on enemies' lists for detailed social network profiling (as intended), by definition a clean-up process falls within the scope of NSA capacity and budgets. My guess? The specific program initially exposed by the Snowden docs outlived its usefulness, as a next generation program doing the same job "better, stronger, faster" displaced it. That new program does not exist for legislative and legal purposes, because nobody outside compartments with authorized access to it knows it exists. Considering that U.S. public policy embraces mass murder "in The National Interest," just recording and saving everything that crosses the network for later use in retroactive surveillance raises no possible "moral" or "legal" issues. Hell, consider what archive.org, a nonprofit, manages to do. Example: https://web.archive.org/web/20190130133923/https://www.brookings.edu/researc...