The NSA Has Apparently Stopped the Domestic Surveillance Program Snowden Exposed - Hit & Run : Reason.com

Steve Kinney admin at pilobilus.net
Tue Mar 5 17:54:28 PST 2019



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-shut-down.html

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/research/recording-everything-digital-storage-as-an-enabler-of-authoritarian-governments/









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