Last December in an interview with Russia Today (video above), former NSA crypto-mathematician William Binney disclosed the extent to which he believed the US government was not only capable of, but actively engages in spying on internet data and web activity across the country. Binney said that the FBI has access to the emails of everyone in the US, holds a target list and monitors every email to and from those contained on the list.
If the interview was alarming in its suggestion then, it’s downright scary considering this evening’s report from the Washington Post and the Guardian that the US government has allegedly been mining data from eight of the world’s largest internet companies, including Google, Apple, Microsoft and others. (The report mentions nine companies; one of them, YouTube, is part of Google.)
Counting the days to commercial fusion. It is not that long now.
In the event they are solely gathering intelligence towards supporting the war authorized against AlQaeda and it's affiliates, no warrant has ever been required to prosecute a war. The 5th amendment deals with civil law and the civil courts and their actions.
The thing is, this administration has shown itself to not respect any actual constitutional limits. It limits itself only to the extent it thinks it can or can't get away with something.
molon labe
montani semper liberi
para fides paternae patria
TD, The NSA is gathering everything. Is everything connected to terror? It was this way under both Bush and Obama, and has gotten worse. It is actually worth it to listen to the videos. Further to the point is that when the FBI who has access to this data base goes fishing, if anything political is stumbled upon it can be used. Hence the downfall of Petraeus, remember how that happened, emails? And looking for leaks? Has anybody a close relative that might have said something political and then has the IRS going over their tax returns?
Orwell had no way of knowing what the government could do, only what they would like to be able to do. We now have the ability to do everything they would desire, totally. But you are right, what's there to worry about?
Counting the days to commercial fusion. It is not that long now.
The Guardian article itself states they are not looking at everything. It says they are looking at millions of calls. If they were looking at everything, it would be billions.
They are neccessarily being restrictive then to the tune of a factor of one in a thousand.
There also has never been a warrant requirement, for example, to see who is contacting whom. For better or worse it is a long-standing--no warrant required--principle of surveillance law that that is the same as reading the outside of an envelope.
A warrant is required to open the envelope
molon labe
montani semper liberi
para fides paternae patria
If you do not encrypt you will get sipped. This is the unclass versions of what's out there not to mention predator and a host of others.like echelon and Room 641A most of this stuff is old school I would hate to think of what they can do now.
Carnivore
Carnivore was a system implemented by the Federal Bureau of Investigation that was designed to monitor email and electronic communications. It used a customizable packet sniffer that can monitor all of a target user's Internet traffic. Carnivore was implemented in October 1997. Now consider outdated
NarusInsight
System specification and capabilities
Some features of NarusInsight include:
Scalability to support surveillance of large, complex IP networks (such as the Internet)
High-speed Packet processing performance, which enables it to sift through the vast quantities of information that travel over the Internet.
Normalization, Correlation, Aggregation and Analysis provide a model of user, element, protocol, application and network behaviors, in real-time. That is it can track individual users, monitor which applications they are using (e.g. web browsers, instant messaging applications, email) and what they are doing with those applications (e.g. which web sites they have visited, what they have written in their emails/IM conversations), and see how users' activities are connected to each other (e.g. compiling lists of people who visit a certain type of web site or use certain words or phrases in their emails).
High reliability from data collection to data processing and analysis.
NarusInsight's functionality can be configured to feed a particular activity or IP service such as security lawful intercept or even Skype detection and blocking.
Compliance with CALEA and ETSI.
Certified by Telecommunication Engineering Center (TEC) in India for lawful intercept and monitoring systems for ISPs.
The intercepted data flows into NarusInsight Intercept Suite. This data is stored and analyzed for surveillance and forensic analysis purposes.
Other capabilities include playback of streaming media (i.e. VoIP), rendering of web pages, examination of e-mail and the ability to analyze the payload/attachments of e-mail or file transfer protocols. Narus partner products, such as Pen-Link, offer the ability to quickly analyze information collected by the Directed Analysis or Lawful Intercept modules.
A single NarusInsight machine can monitor traffic equal to the maximum capacity (10 Gbit/s) of around 39,000 256k DSL lines or 195,000 56k telephone modems. But, in practical terms, since individual internet connections are not continually filled to capacity, the 10 Gbit/s capacity of one NarusInsight installation enables it to monitor the combined traffic of several million broadband users.
I am not a nuclear physicist, but play one on the internet.
Governments around the world are setting a trap for themselves by elimanating the notion of privacy. I've seen images reconstructed from the visial cortex by MRI's that are almost like the original, experiments have been conducted where signals are transmitted by wire between rat brains. Combine this type of technology and give it twenty years to evolve and humanity will have a single hive type mind where everybody has complete access to all the living memories of everybody else.
The government will push the tech and get trapped by it, suddenly it becomes impossible for the government to keep secrets, all covert ops, all assasinations, all conspiracies become exposed to humanity in it's entirety. But as the authorities like to say, if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.
Here's something very bizarre for all the coincidence theorists out there to try. Spell illuminati backwars in your browser and add .com to the end, see where it takes you.
