31–40 of 85 posts
What I don't understand is with such capabilities, why weren't Michelle carters texts flagged? Or the heather Mack texts/fb messages. Or the texts revolving around the death of Tim piazza at penn state? If the capability to save these people was there, why wasn't it exercised?
What I don't understand is with such capabilities, why weren't Michelle carters texts flagged? Or the heather Mack texts/fb messages. Or the texts revolving around the death of Tim piazza at penn state? If the capability to save these people was there, why wasn't it exercised?
Note that one of the more useful and interesting uses for this data would be political demographic analysis more comprehensive than anything available legitimately. It could also be used to target leakers, especially if you could use devices to put 3rd parties in the same room. E.g. my phone hears or sees you and your friend together, even if you don't have phones.
So a quick calculation. 1 zettabyte if stored on 4GB HDD, that's 250 million hard drives. That's without any redundancy. Quarterly production of hard drives is around 100-140 million. That's quite a big slice of global production. The buying operation of this scale should be visible somewhere on the price charts.
US defense spending built most of the technology industry. That activity didn't stop.
So a quick calculation. 1 zettabyte if stored on 4GB HDD, that's 250 million hard drives. That's without any redundancy. Quarterly production of hard drives is around 100-140 million. That's quite a big slice of global production. The buying operation of this scale should be visible somewhere on the price charts.
So a quick calculation. 1 zettabyte if stored on 4GB HDD, that's 250 million hard drives. That's without any redundancy. Quarterly production of hard drives is around 100-140 million. That's quite a big slice of global production. The buying operation of this scale should be visible somewhere on the price charts.
How is Bill Binney still walking around a free man? Surely he had security clearances and made an oath not to break them. Is it just that he's riding a fine line and not disclosing classified information?
As far as the actual legality of the things he does, it seems like pretty much everything in the talk I had heard before, mostly through the Snowden files.
What I don't understand is with such capabilities, why weren't Michelle carters texts flagged? Or the heather Mack texts/fb messages. Or the texts revolving around the death of Tim piazza at penn state? If the capability to save these people was there, why wasn't it exercised?
Occam's razor says it's because the capability to gather far exceeds the NSA's ability to analyze . The data they collect is probably run through basic automated analysis (probably keywords, sentiment, and social network analysis, possibly some attempt to correlate to interesting real-world activity like purchase of large amounts of fertilizer, etc). But mostly the cache is used for retroactive surveillance to catch…
The bar for collusion is really low. Look at what happened to the pot dealer for the guys that bombed the Boston marathon.
The odds of any one transaction coming back to get you are practically and almost literally zero but when something bad happens it doesn't happen in a vacuum. The bank robbers have to buy their getaway car from someone.
What I don't understand is with such capabilities, why weren't Michelle carters texts flagged? Or the heather Mack texts/fb messages. Or the texts revolving around the death of Tim piazza at penn state? If the capability to save these people was there, why wasn't it exercised?
He states it in the video: they are incredibly overwhelmed with data coming in and are just using "old search methods" such as word search that he deems ineffective. My understanding is that this bulk data gathering is not as much as preventing attacks but further securing of power for the strange amalgamation that we would call the federal government.
I know in other fields the ability to do concept searching (via LSI and other techniques), rather than simple text based searching, has been in use for many years. His example/problem of a search for "bomb" bringing up noise (such as an email talking about a QB throwing a 'bomb' pass) should have long ago been solved.
How is Bill Binney still walking around a free man? Surely he had security clearances and made an oath not to break them. Is it just that he's riding a fine line and not disclosing classified information?
I didn't watch the whole thing just jumped around but he has included slides that are marked 'SECRET//NOFORN' so if that material is accurately classified at that level (and its disclosure was not authorized), well he probably shouldn't be presenting to that. Of course whether those slides would cause 'serious damage' to national security is a whole other matter or maybe it was 'authorized'.