NSA harvests 200M of SMSes every day with untargeted, global "Dishfire" program

I think the “alphabet soup parentheticals” are classification levels and “caveats” indicating who the information can be released to.

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I would guess that the parentheticals are required in any document produced at NSA. A technical description of the nature of the secrecy on every paragraph. It is not of any consequence that the paragraphs are only one sentence in this case. Universally ignored.

The creepiest thing about this is the smiley face at the intersection of sets in the Venn diagram. We all know someone at work who will do shit like that on a PowerPoint slide.

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I have been trying WICKR; it’s freely available for Apple and Android devices; full encrypted text, video, voice, pictures; it installs in five minutes and so far it works. If we can get a bunch of people trying this thing, maybe we can slow down the ‘data harvesters’ a bit.

yup.

u- unclassified
FOUO - for official use only
s- secret
etc.

classifying line-by-line makes it easier when it’s redaction time.

I just continued to be amazed that Snowden had access to such disparate programs.

For example, it’s just terrible opsec that he had access to both this SMS program and the radio program. They are just so different that the type of unfettered access to the details of both is something that I can’t imagine he had at his level, let alone the scores of other information he’s released.

I will not be surprised to learn that he had help in obtaining some of this info.

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It’s probably a sad sign that the thing that has me most outraged at this point is that the slide uses the word “metacontent” to replace the perfectly good “content”, which anyway would be the correct term for what they’re collecting - the content of text messages.

I just can’t bestir myself to outrage at the NSA’s abuses of US citizens, the constitution, democratic oversight - the only thing that gets a reaction anymore is their abuse of the English language.

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There have already been articles about how he got this information, from borrowing his superior’s credentials to using his own system administrator privileges to get on systems he would otherwise have no “need to know” on. Thus far we have not seen any mention of accomplices, and he had the tools necessary to do everything himself, so it’s plausible that he acted alone.

I’ve read those accounts and I find them a little incredulous. Both he and his supervisor could have been immediately fired (or worse!) for sharing credentials. It’s very very rare to find two people with that level of clearance who would be willing to take such a risk. People with that level of access tend to be very paranoid by nature.

That aside, the fact that he and/or his supervisor would have such access violates core principles of SCI. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classified_information_in_the_United_States#Access_to_compartmented_information

The first week’s worth of releases: plausible. The fact that we’re seeing weekly if not daily new revelations makes me very skeptical of the idea that he grabbed all this himself.

What’s written in the books and what people actually do aren’t always the same thing. Sometimes people just have to get work done. It’s one of the paradoxes of security, where if you bolt down everything too tight, people have to start ignoring your rules just to get their job done, and in the end open up bigger vulnerabilities than a slightly less restrictive policy would have.

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Well done. :smiley:

In what world is “Meta Content” = Content ?

It’s disturbing how much the current political system is twisting concepts and definitions to equivocate on the laws of the nation.

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I commented above, but I believe they’re doing that is to bypass legal definitions.

Same reason we now have enhanced interrogation tactics.

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I’m not talking about a “slightly less restrictive policy.” I’m talking about fundamental firewalls between separate operations. To reiterate my example, the Dishfire and the Cottonmouth projects are so fundamentally different in nature that it would be very unusual for a guy at his level to have access to (or even knowledge of) both.

And yet, he’s attributed to having access to some 30 different subcompartments? http://www.myantiwar.org/view/268615.html (Cottonmouth is not even on that list)

You are welcome to believe what you want, but you’re not giving me reason to retreat from my skepticism.

The traffic is the haystack. What they’re doing is making more needles.

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The letter and the spirit of the law was once understood as enough to catch the bad guys. So much for that.

NSA: You said we couldn’t grab any content on American citizens, you didn’t say “Meta content”.

I wonder if the attrition rate at NSA has changed at all because of Snowden’s revelations?

Unfortunately, I believe our current social-media overlords have aided and abetted the current zeitgeist in understanding how one can infinitely maneuver around the letter and the spirit of the laws.

All it takes is a good PR campaign, a media blitz and fake reference sources to prior works to act like this is the real definition.

A good example is the PR war waged on wikipedia to generate content that has no merit to the general public, but is valuable to the google aggregation engine, which then drives visibility.

I haven’t seen it yet in the snowden leaks, but a couple of years ago, a story was posted about the CIA/NSA or whoever had put out a request for proposal on a piece of software that could track at least 50 pseudonyms on Facebook; lo and behold, twitter is infested with the same type of software.

The zeitgeist is fanning the flames to continually redefine our perceptions, and it’s clear that our current systems of checks and balances simply don’t work because they’re too slow.

They simply cannot keep up with how people, public, private and in the NSA are rerouting concepts and ideas to fit their agendas.

There’s a great quote to end with, and I’m arsed to find it, but it revolves around rallying people to an idea after one has chosen a course. It’s almost as if technology has switch from following to leading.

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The tail wagging the dog, maybe? But good points, all.

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And he’s the guy tasked with making sure the servers in a particular datacenter stay running? Every project doesn’t get their own set of sysadmins, that would be hideously inefficient. While he theoretically wouldn’t have access to the live data, it’s hard to completely block the guy who needs root to keep the machine patched and up to date.

And in some cases where he was effectively blocked, he was able to use his superior’s credentials instead.

Apparently he worked on a smaller site and odd hours so the oversight was not as stringent as it might have otherwise been.

Something deeper than that, but that’s sufficient. This is as close as I got:

It is not to be forgotten that what we call rational grounds for our beliefs are often extremely irrational attempts to justify our instincts.
Thomas Huxley

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