Pentagon mass surveillance slurped up the world's social media traffic; then they dumped it on a publicly accessible Amazon cloud server

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Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2017/11/17/dark-clouds.html

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I’m going to need some time to review the documents before I issue a formal opinion on this. Please bear with me a bit.

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If you’re looking for a needle in a haystack, the most effective course of action is to amass infinite haystacks.

/s

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“The UpGuard Cyber Risk Team can now disclose…” The article fails to mention who cleared for publication. Key piece of info missing.

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Also “Vendor X”? Am I just supposed sit here with my empty tumbrel like a dumbass?

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something-smells-fishy-and-it-certainly-isnt-fish

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Where are they keeping their porn stash?

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Is FetLife considered “social media”? Asking for a friend.

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Yes, but you can’t see a thing unless you also have an account. There was one well known effort to scrape it by the University of Sydney. That got shut down pretty quickly.

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If this is all public posts, the harm of having it on a public cloud is pretty low. The DoD is far from the only organization or company mining social media.

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The Pentagon? Not NSA? Ok, so who does signals intelligence in the U.S.?

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1.8 billion posts? What is that, a day or two’s worth?

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Let me run down the ones I know for sure… The Navy, Marine Corps, Army, and the NSA and FBI. The CIA but only inside the USA under special circumstances and conditions. NASA, although again only in specialized ways. Almost certainly many others.

The Navy is really the big cheese in US SIGINT, is what I’ve always heard from my acquaintances in the trade.

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Kids mind your tweets. Esp w photos. Just say’n.

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We need to get people to react to this. There’s an infrastructure that their forebears spilled blood and suffered loss to create, and it’s being lost in the “she ate my last fry” gobshite couch laziness.

You’ve nailed it - Posse Comitatus needs to be enforced, and erosion is nowhere near an acceptable outcome.
strong text

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Buncha vendorx.

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That’s just Trump’s tweets.

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“As Upguard writes, this raises two important questions: why is the DoD spying on everyone (including US citizens at home and abroad, as well as active-duty service members), and why were they so careless with all the data they amassed through that spying?”
Exactly. That’s the NSA’s gig.

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