New Yorker article: Enemy of the State

[Tyler Durden]

Anyone read this?

I'd say it verified much of what was discussed on this list some years back,
about the likely approach by NSA to get "all" the traffic.

Of course, getting "all" the traffic would have required building a 1-for-1
fiber optic network, which I think we agreed was beyond even the nearly
infinite budget of NSA. Instead, they had to push the trafffic through
successive prioritization gates, throwing away a bunch at the edges, and the
sending the higher priority stuff through to the beltway. It would appear from
the article that the original approach had machines tagging likely traffic
needing human review, and that they originally intended to obtain a
(perfunctory) warrant for traffic both ends of which belonged to US residents.
But they apparently dispensed with the warrant formality and instead sent high
priority trafffic direct to immediate review, and stored the rest of it.

None of this, of course, is a surpise. We figured it out from fairly
straightforward principals. But what Wikileaks has shown us is that the main
problem with transparency is that it makes obvious their pathetic and
incompetent mangement, and it makes obvious their strong desire to obfuscate
their incompetence. Indeed, the persecution of the whistleblower is (at least
from the perspective of the article) not so much a punishment for revealing
state secrets (which were pretty obviously illegal), but instead revenge for
exposing the unneccessary cowboy management of the NSA during the post-9/11
period.

-TD