I’m just throwing this out for comment.
“Direct access” implies that NSA can just root around in Google’s servers whenever they want. That’s big news. Conversely, a story about how companies transfer information to NSA after they get a court order is a complete nothing. Who cares what technical means are used to transfer data to NSA? What we care about is what kind of information NSA is getting, and nothing in the PRISM story has given us any insight into that.
If Snowden really has the technical chops he claims to have, he should have cleared this up. But Greenwald and Gellman apparently didn’t ask about it, and Snowden apparently didn’t volunteer anything. (I say “apparently” because I don’t know for sure who said what to whom.) This suggests either that Snowden didn’t know what this phrase meant or else chose not to explain it properly. Either one raises some red flags.
Do read Drum’s entire post.
Update: Rick Perlstein corroborates that “direct access” probably doesn’t mean what some people assumed it meant.
DANG!
It all makes it seem less and less likely that they were actually looking all through our computer records.
There goes my case for petitioning the government for redress, and asking them to restore the memory the next time my hard-drive crashes.
What I saw when Snowden was speaking was the normal hesitations of a computer geek when trying to explain heavily technical material to an audience of non-geeks. Invariably simplifications happen, but if I (as a computer expert) attempt to go into low-level details invariably people’s eyes glaze over as it descends into a morass of computerese jibberish (as far as they’re concerned).. Regarding the government keeping a copy of Facebook and Google’s data, why would they bother doing that when Facebook and Google are already doing that job for them? 🙂
Gee whiz! Somebody pushed my outrage button and distracted me from my basic anti-war and women’s rights obsessions.
Oddly enough, I didn’t fall for the guy right off, as is my nature. Really the only one I’m worried about being trustworthy is General Keith Alexander. I hope they keep grilling him in public.
My understanding of privacy was shaped back when I was a youngster trying to wrest the party line from Mrs. Kales so I could chat with a friend. Now, for that convenience I happily turn my computer over to a young man who has better things to do than investigate me.
“It all makes it seem less and less likely that they were actually looking all through our computer records”
You know this is what puzzles me about how people perceive the internet. When you are at home and rooting around on the webs, it all goes thru your ISP, they have a record of everywhere you go. At work your company is most likely monitoring what you’re up to they have a record of everything you do. I frankly don’t understand why people think the NSA storing all this data is a problem. I’ve always assumed that the ISP or Corporation would just turn over any requested data anyway. And after the illegal program was disclosed in 2007 and then “tweeked” in 2008 to be legal I thought we all knew this had been going on all the while. The way I understand the program today, if the Gubmint thinks you’re involved in some tom-foolery they go to FISA get a warrant and then look at your data they have stored. How is this different than if they go to FISA get a warrant and make the ISP turn over the data? I understand the system can be abused by bad actors at the NSA, is that any different than a bad cop abusing his authority? Had Snowden leaked some information on the NSA using the data to go after people for reasons other than criminal activity, why then he and Glenn Beck I mean Greenwald would have themselves a story.
My wife observed that there’s something a little narcissistic about feeling personally exposed and violated because yours was among the tens of millions of peoples’ data that the government may or may not have access to. Just look at how hard it is to get attention on the internet when you do want it. At any rate, I don’t know see why anybody other than the people I send them to give a damn about my text messages.
But yes, this gets at what I find most irritating about this whole situation, which is that some of the people who are yelling the loudest about the NSA have no idea what they’re talking about. And of course they’re too busy expressing their outrage that they don’t have any time or energy left to think about what’s actually going on here.
It all makes it seem less and less likely that they were actually looking all through our computer records.
That too, and everything uncledad said. Even with extra powerful servers, we’re talking about a stupendous amount of data here, and it keeps proliferating at a faster and faster rate even while the NSA (or Google, or China, or whoever) is trying to gather it and analyze it.
I was just thinking, with the Verizon thing, we were told that the NSA was getting tens of millions of people’s phone records, but without the content of texts or conversations. Let’s assume that’s true, though of course it may not be. So back in the paper age, this would basically be equivalent to having tens of millions of phone bills to sort through.
How many filing cabinets would it take to store tens of millions of phone bills? And what you can do with them? You can send in a legion of clerks to look at them all, but what are you going to find that way that could possibly be worth the effort?
I frankly don’t understand why people think the NSA storing all this data is a problem.
Because there’s no oversight. There’s no telling how people either now or in the future will use this information.
I have a Jewish friend, born in Germany, who lost most of his aunts and uncles to the Holocaust. These relatives innocently answered “Jewish” to questions of “religious affiliation” that were commonly asked of new patients at doctors offices, back in the day. Records like these were used by Hitler’s goons to find and round up the Jews. They had no idea in, say 1925, that by simply and honestly answering an innocent question – that had nothing to do with medical treatment – that this information would be used against them, years down the road.
This same friend found himself going through an unlawful job termination. The employer had a high powered legal team that dug through years of medical and other records, eventually finding enough details, through notes made by doctors of innocent remarks made by my friend during various examinations, to construct a very twisted picture of my friend, which was used against him during the divorce proceedings. All of this information was innocently and freely given by my friend, but years later, it was discovered, twisted and used against him. And all of this was before ObamaCare’s electronic medical record keeping.
We live in a country where basic constitutional protections have been quietly eroded away, and few people even know or care. If the president decides you are a terrorist, you can be sent to Guantanamo Bay, without a trial, or even executed. We used to be a country that was ruled by laws, not by men – this is what separated America from every other nation – but that is no more, and people don’t even know or care. And now we’ve created this super spy agency that can track every move of every citizen.
This is not a good trajectory – a public that allows this kind of thing to happen, will have no problem voting in people who will promise to “protect” them or “save” them, granting them all kinds of powers, including the power to use this collected information in any way they see fit.
Robert Reich has a good article on the two centers of unaccountable power in this country.
The term direct access really is misleading. It’s pretty much meaningless by itself. In one sense, we all have direct access to Google’s servers. Just click here.
So Drum is right, if we don’t know who exactly had access to what, we know nothing. And it does seem likely that PRISM is an information sharing protocol. For one thing, I don’t think the NSA would want too much access to Google’s data, since that could compromise their own security. They would want to filter what’s coming into their network.
So there’s that, and otherwise it’s unlikely that Google’s servers and the NSA’s servers speak the same language, so there would have to be a way to translate data between the two. So to transfer the data, Google has to create an output file that contains a copy of some of their data in a format that the NSA’s system can use. So it makes sense that that’s what PRISM is for.
If you are truly concerned about being monitored, just go everywhere and fuck up your profile. I heard there are jihadi web sites, and that Al-Qada has an on line magazine. Really, an on line Al-Qada MAGAZINE? When did we drop through the rabbit hole? And why is there no “U” in Al-Qada? Who makes this shit up?
A righty co-worker tells me his friends are reading 1984, well, they’re only about 10 f’ing years too late. He also thinks people who are unemployed should be excluded from jury duty, and that Wal*Mart and McDonalds should hire the unemployed cretins sucking off the system, so they can pay taxes too.
If the NSA profiles me, they will find out I don’t use recreational drugs, but favor legalizing mary jane, I grow gourmet mushrooms and blueberries, I make soup, I have Facebook friends who are Mermaids, I’m a Buddhist leaning secular humanist that is not fond of Israel’s lukid party, and that I’ll have to work until I drop dead, and don’t have weapons, save my chainsaw and pike pole.F’in BOO!
You have Facebook friends who are mermaids?
If the NSA profiles me
Ha, somewhere Susan Rice is ogling my gallery of Hot British Actors (all with trousers on). Enjoy!
A righty co-worker tells me his friends are reading 1984, well, they’re only about 10 f’ing years too late.
I guess that’s an improvement on “Atlas Shrugged.” Still, they have no understanding that this is the world they made.
This is funny. Here’s how righties respond when they learn Orwell was a socialist.
“You have Facebook friends who are Mermaids?”
Yep, 5 or so, they perform at children’s birthday parties and do photo shoots at fantasy faires.(Cute kids, I think of them as daughters) I never would have believed it, but Mermaids are real ( costume required). One lives in Oklahoma. Who-a-thunk? I’m trying to expand my network so I can survive retirement as a broken down decrepant deep sea diver who can’t spell for s*it, I’m hoping the Mermaids can help.
“We live in a country where basic constitutional protections have been quietly eroded away, and few people even know or care”
If people don’t want the Gubmint or corporations rooting around in your internet fun then they can always stop using it. I know a few folks that don’t go online and they get along just fine. The thing that some don’t understand is that the internet is not your house, you may be in your house while your on it but you are effectively in a public space subject to all the mores of society. I can sit in my house and do and say what I please with the expectation of privacy, but I can’t sit on a park bench and expect the same. When your on the internet your sitting on the park bench. How is the NSA storing your online life any different than the police videotaping you on the street with their pole mounted camera, issuing tickets when you run a red light? The internet has evolved much quicker than our laws so there is a whole lot of gray area, I trust our congress critters will get this all straightened out any day now right after they fix THIS!
Even if you stopped using the internet, your credit card transactions, checking, and phone calls are all traceable. It’s much more than just internet usage.
moonbat,
In these rapidly advancing technological times, I kind of assume that they have some sort of micro-chip in every electronic appliance.
Not necessarily for surveillance, but for “better customer service.”
I bet if I bought a new toaster, and used if for a month, if I set how dark I want my toast that day differently, it would pipe up with, “But don’t you usually like it dark? Because if you want it lighter, I’ll have to tell the fridge to warm your butter a little earlier. By the way, it’s free the first 10 times – after that, it’ll be $1 every time I call the fridge – and it doesn’t always answer the call, so if I have to leave a message, that’ll be an extra buck.”
There might or might not be a reason to copy data if the type of analysis being done requires repetitive data access. No public utility, and I consider google, the phone company and other as such) would agree to new, free resource usage (i.e. data access) that might impact their core service delivery. Impact depends on frequency and frequency depends on the type of analysis the NSA is doing. For low frequency access NSA might access utility data ad hoc. For high frequency data access they would surely copy the bare essentials to NSA machines so as not to impact utility service levels.
The high speed acess to determine patterns and intersections is far more difficult and even impossible when the data is distributed and resides on disparate systems.
It is also unclear whether the data accessible by NSA (regardless of where it is) divulges identity. For example, my identity might be maintained as an alias, such as Mr. X or a big long number, different from each utility. With a court order (or perhaps a FISA court order or none at all) my true identity could be filled in which then would give a mroe personal meaning to the data. Then specific phone number and website usage would be known and the intersection with those of other watched individuals could be determined.
Also, complete data lets the government know which “aliases” access sites and phones known to be connnected with terrorism and the revelation of identities (rather than depersonalized meaningless aliases) could be court ordered on that basis.
It is quite possible to maintain an aliased database of events…in other words, a log of all communication and info access that’s continually maintained and can be used to identify persons should a known association or suspicion of an individual justify the revelation of the identity for an alias.
This is the way I’d approach the problem. It’s such a strange beast that it is very hard indeed for most including those in media to get their heads around. I’d characterize it as a nameless/identityless database of all recordable human communication in which names could be selectively revealed based on various criteria. One might call such a thing an inference engine which is an offshoot of artificial intelligence research.
In a sense, it might not be considered anything more than a faster and more foolproof way of doing after-the-fact legwork commonly done by police but at the speed of light because all the information would have been pre-gathered.
This would be very powerful indeed and enable the government to, for example, once knowing a website used steganography for terrorist communications, get a court order to substitute actual person’s names to substitute for aliases in the “model”. Then the inference engine could extract meaningful intersections with other suspicious activity, persons, or information sources.
It’s a little hard to understand and even more difficult to communicate. When something is that obscure it’s easily subjected to misuse so maybe the hysteria is not unfounded. Even the usage limitations were even codified who’d be able to understand them anyway? Given all the unfounded hysteria with Obama’s birth certificate one can imagine heads exploding over something that actually was a little mysterious.
Because of the power of such a large event database, even if individual anonymity could be flicked on and off on like a switch it hardly matters that the default state for an individuals records is anonymous. If a known terrorist is identified there could be a blanket court order to establish identiity of all persons with whom the suspected had contact, possibly even contacts of contacts of contacts, searching for connections with known bad things or people. If complete enough, such a thing could be effective but as with everything computerized there’s always a human behind it who might trust coincidental connections and act on them as if they implied something nefarious. Then their only defense would be “But the computer told me to do it!” which is a little frightening. If a tool can only express a likelihood of something it would be a bad mistake to consider that information actionable as opposed to a very good starting point for policework that could yield a high rate of success, albeit still short of 100%. Associations are often coincidental.
What concerns me is Greenwald’s reaction. He’s been defensive without addressing the issue at hand. Frankly, his site is starting to funcion as a liberal Breitbart site.
If he was misled, he needs to say so. If he’s right and NSA can root around indiscriminately, he needs to prove it. If he has tried to blow a bad program way out of proportion in an attempt to panic liberals into following him – he’s doing a Breitbart and the entire blogosphere should turn against him. That’s harsh but true.
There’s no reason for either side to distort facts – the right should be ashamed but that’s all the more reason we on the left must reject that strategy.
“Even if you stopped using the internet, your credit card transactions, checking, and phone calls are all traceable. It’s much more than just internet usage”
I’ll never leave my house ever again.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxRVMzkQ3hE
http://ericmargolis.com/2013/06/big-brother-is-listening-to-you/
An interesting read on life in a military project and secrecy: Denise Kiernan’s “The Girls Of Atomic City” about the Manhattan Project in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. It’s amazing that those people were kept in the dark about what they were doing until the bomb was used on Hiroshima. Thousands of people kept their jobs and lives secret for years. Many were told they were helping to end the war, just not how.
She describes a recent visit to a data warehouse there that resembles the last scene of Indiana Jones.