It's disappointing to know that the technology I invented in 1999 (IP location) is now being used in such a massive and unconstitutional manner. No good deed goes unpunished. :-/
Also - everyone should use and support Tor. That has a hint of irony since it was originally sponsored by the US Naval Research Laboratory.
LOL! That document shows they use GWT to build their internal spook apps. (Disclosure: I work on GWT) I wonder if they review all patches that open source people make to the compiler :)
"Current technology simply does not permit us to positively identify all of the persons or locations associated with a given communication (for example, it may be possible to say with certainty that a communication traversed a particular path within the internet. It is harder to know the ultimate source or destination, or more particularly the identity of the person represented by the TO:, FROM: or CC: field of an e-mail address or the abstraction of an IP address)."
That's an interesting statement, especially how specific they got with regards to email. There are tons of email accounts that are used but are not tied to Facebook or Paypal or some other identifying service that the NSA has access. To me this all stinks of the worst-case surveillance state scenario but logically, it's starting to look a lot less sinister than I initially thought it was.
Looking through 3 billion records and tying them to people would require a massive database of Facebook, Google, etc. users, ISP subscribers, and tons of other data. I sure as hell hope that the NSA can't come up with a number of Americans spied on without invading people's privacy and serving more warrants/tapping more sources for information because otherwise it would mean they would already have it!
It's also comforting (in a macabre way) that despite having fifty times more people, the US has more than 10 billion fewer records than Jordan (records = what? Likes? Facebook messages? Emails?)
They also said they track the "path" of the data, does that mean that a lot of the American records could just be inconsequential movements of network data within the US before it is sent back out or delivered?
Looking at this article, it doesn't disprove anything the NSA said. It's a heat map of communications, not people spied on and there's a big difference.
I think it bears repeating again, as we see yet another major disclosure about NSA programs throughout the world: the NSA has been hacked by someone who is deliberately leaking these documents in some super-Risk game of international espionage. Given that Obama and the President of China are meeting this weekend, my money is on China being the ultimate culprit.
One of the journalist involved has stated that the leaker is a US government employee in the intelligence sector. Granted they could have been deceived as well, but I think that's far less likely.
There are numerous groups that may have leaked this. For instance, it could very well be that the NSA itself put this material out there. Consider the following. Perhaps the NSA has the exact capabilities that many people are now complaining against, specifically the direct access stuff. They "leak" a document about this as most people suspect they do anyways. The media publishes these documents. People get worried. New technologies bubble to the surface in response to this. The NSA observes those new technologies. Now, they didn't have to hunt down the tools used to hide data from them. They've cleverly "forced" those tools out into the open. It's a lot easier to spy on people when you know what tools are being used to keep you from spying on people.
"hacked"? It could easily be someone(s) with legitimate access to these documents, couldn't it? International espionage in what way? The leaker(s) could have just sold this information to foreign governments, but they went to Greenwald, a civil liberties advocate and writer working for an American sub-outlet of a British news org.
Alright, I'll grant that it may not be a hack. My point is the quality of the leaks and the timing is too good for it not to have some more serious motivation than what appeared to me to be another instance of the NSA 'Trailblazer/ThinThread', etc ongoing whistle-blowing.
If you read Greenwald's writing regularly, you know that this is exactly the kind of information about the kind of programs that Glenn has been imagining to exist, for many many years, during both administrations. The timing comes from at least a month of planning; Greenwald has hinted at a "big project" for a while now. The daily releases are just Glenn's style, and it's certainly gaining the attention he, as a civil liberties advocate for years now and a former constitutional lawyer, feels is needed for our democracy to continue.
There are many green points in the EU section of the map, we may be able to infer that those nations are indeed cooperative with US interests. US-EU relations are damaged only insomuch as the eurodeputies are willing to push against their leaders.
>She added: "The continued publication of these allegations about highly classified issues, and other information taken out of context, makes it impossible to conduct a reasonable discussion on the merits of these programs."
I can think of a few other things that have "[made] it impossible to conduct a reasonable discussion on the merits of these programs." That they're classified Top Secret. That numerous attempts to investigate the programs via the judicial process have been stymied under the "military and state secrets privilege." That whistleblowers have been hunted down and persecuted. And the list goes on.
edit: PSA: waterphone, your account appears to be hellbanned.
It looks like they do as much spying on Germany as they do on China and US itself. Interesting. I wonder what Germans and the German MEP's will have to say about this in the EU Parliament.
How much spying occurs is extremely difficult to measure, I think we can say without a doubt that this isn't their only tool.
One could infer that the colours on the map measure how much surveillance they have to do on their own, as opposed to receiving information from external intelligence networks. For example, green provides the most intelligence information while red is the least cooperative.
Based on that we can assume that Germany is less cooperative -- as a matter of fact we can also assume international allegiances from this map. It appears the US has trouble penetrating the BRIC nations[1].
Boundless Informant appears to not be an actual spying tool, but rather a GAO tool for monitoring how much spying is going on.
The colors correspond with the amount of intelligence collected. Green is the least, red is the most. If you expand the screenshot at the top, it shows part of a sorted list showing the most. Primary intelligence gathering is focused on Iran, Pakistan, Jordan, Egypt and India. 14 billion pieces of intelligence were gathered from Iran in the 30 day period shown here!
97 billion pieces of intelligence gathered worldwide in a one month period! 3 billion of which are from the U.S. If that's not an example of a massive dragnet surveillance program, I don't know what is.
In software terms, it seems like someone there built a dashboard for higher-ups, and have promised to listen to feedback in a very enterprise-y "complexity vs reward" triage process.
That probably has a lot to do with how isolated they are. From back in my days of doing IP location technology, North Korea had less than 50 public IP addresses whereas Antarctica had well over 1,000.
Also - everyone should use and support Tor. That has a hint of irony since it was originally sponsored by the US Naval Research Laboratory.