XKeyscore: NSA program collects 'nearly everything a user does on the internet'

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/audio/video...

says: Top Secret Comm(?) REL() to USA, AUS, CAN, GBR, NZL

confirming the previous suspicions that many other governments are on board.

Der Spiegel actually has reported a few weeks back about XKeyscore [1] and that it is used by the BND (Germany's NSA). I.e. all this data is also available to the NSA equivalents of Australia, Candana, Great Britain and New Zealand.

Many Americans trust their government (unfortunately), will they also trust the other governments?

[1]:

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/german-intelligenc...

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/german-intellige...

Using the Facebook Graph API, we can gather information based on this ID: http://graph.facebook.com/1536051595

Which leads us to the Facebook profile (https://www.facebook.com/arash.gorjipour.5) of an individual, real or contrived, named "Arash Gorjipour". His email address and phone number are all exposed in one of his uploaded photos: http://i.imgur.com/0UUk5cB.jpg

I wonder what the reason for this man being in these slides is.

I'm not an expert in this area of mathematics, so I could be wrong, but my impression is that as the haystack becomes larger the problem of false positives becomes more and more severe.

As a data miner, what you want is the maximum number of "hits" (of whatever you're trying to hit) with the minimum number of misses and the minimum number of false positives. My impression is that this becomes progressively harder-- the golden region between too many false positives and too many false negatives becomes smaller and smaller and harder to hit.

Eventually you either miss important hits, namely the next terrorist attack, or you get swamped with false positives that you have to manually investigate and rule out.

I'd love someone who does know more here to chip in, but my personal suspicion is that this actually has a pretty huge pork angle to it. How much money are the contractors getting for building this stuff?

The XKeyscore system is continuously collecting so much internet data that it can be stored only for short periods of time. Content remains on the system for only three to five days, while metadata is stored for 30 days. One document explains: "At some sites, the amount of data we receive per day (20+ terabytes) can only be stored for as little as 24 hours."