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NSA Collects 'Word for Word' Every Domestic Communication, Says Former Analyst

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Re: NSA Collects 'Word for Word' Every Domestic Communication, Says Former Analyst

#101

Post by rcthompson »

espeed wrote: post #74
espeed wrote: post #52

Reposting this from a previous thread ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5897654 )... I remember during the Boston bombing investigation, Tim Clemente, a former FBI counter-terrorism agent, told Erin Burnett on CNN that they could go back and get access to the content of the calls between the deceased bomber and his wife, Katherine Russell. After some Googling, I found a partial transcript of the CNN interview...…

Here's a question I've been pondering: Did the NSA want PRISM to leak? Having everyone in the world know that someone is watching will have significant sociological effects. It is akin to the idea that "God is watching". Thousands of years ago the fear of God and promise of reward was the carrot and stick that resulted in people working together for the greater good rather than pursuing self interest. It was the invi…

I'm sorry to say that pretty much all the biological examples and analogies you give are either wrong or at best controversial and not widely accepted. Bacteria do not group to form mitochondria; mitochondria do not group to form cells. Mitochondra don't even cooperate "willingly" with their host cells, but rather the host cell must incentivize them by withholding essential nutrients from the "slackers" until they shape up. Insect colonies are not "superorganisms"; the individuals within a colony act selfishly, doing things like secretly laying eggs to propagate their genes and sometimes even trying to "usurp the throne" by killing and replacing the queen. The concept of a "superogranism" as a group of individual organisms that evolve together is not generally accepted by biologists [1]. I'm not familiar with Jonathan Haidt's work, so I can't comment directly on that, but your paraphrase above (e.g. "Those that united ... evolved") sounds suspiciously like group selection, and must answer to the same criticisms [1].

The concepts of entropy and order don't really apply in a social system. In many industries the only stable equilibrium is a monopoly [2], which is arguably the least entropic "market state" possible. The "optimal" market according to capitalism is perfect competition among a large number of small independent firms, which is arguably the maximum-entropy state. So it seems that increased entropy should be a good thing.

The word "prism" has a mathematical meaning and a physical meaning, and I think it's pretty clear that when the NSA called their spying program PRISM, they were invoking the physical meaning of a tool that separates light into its components rather than the mathematical meaning of a solid formed by two identical polygons whose sides are connected by parallelograms.

This might seem like nitpicking. If it was just a few examples in your post that were slightly inaccurate, I wouldn't have cared. But your post is clearly trying to give a bunch of examples in order to establish a pattern, and when nearly all of your examples are wrong in significant ways or based on controversial theories, I feel it undermines your the point you were trying to make.

Finally, suggesting that the purpose of a vast surveillance program is anything other than surveillance is going against Occam's razor, and doesn't seem to make sense to me.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_selection#Criticism

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly

Re: NSA Collects 'Word for Word' Every Domestic Communication, Says Former Analyst

#102

Post by jboggan »

redsymbol wrote: post #99

Holy crap: RUSSELL TICE: ...The NSA were targeting individuals. In that case, they were judges like the Supreme Court. I held in my hand Judge Alito's targeting information for his phones and his staff and his family. If true, that's... mind boggling. What possible valid reason could the NSA have to secretly monitor the calls of a US Supreme Court justice? And his staff, AND family? I really hope this allegation is f…

I hope as well, but I doubt it. That kind of secret power begs to be abused. The system of checks and balances that we learned about in civics class is simply gone. A willful executive with these powers at hand can sway the outcome of any congressional vote, any Supreme Court decision, or any media story. Our immune system against tyranny has been compromised and irrevocably so. We haven't yet descended into despotism but it is inevitable once a strong enough individual rises. To carry the analogy further, it's 1984 and we've just contracted HIV.

Re: NSA Collects 'Word for Word' Every Domestic Communication, Says Former Analyst

#104

Post by kennywinker »

acqq wrote: post #41
kennywinker wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very interesting. The tl;dr seems to be: nobody knows for sure, but yes... it could totally be used for full content storage for some length of time.

No, it's not "nobody knows for sure." If you do the right math and don't assume that they have the storage technology not available to the rest of the world (which is a reasonable assumption) it's obvious that the data storage in an accessible way inside that center has an upper bound of an order of around one exabyte (1e18) (a million terabytes). So it's even more probable that it's less, say 0.2 EB. Now somebody he…

You seem very confident of your input parameters. What are you basing 0.2-1EB on? It seems like there is a lot unknown about the utah data center, so all their "expert estimates" sounded more like guesses. Hence my conclusion "nobody knows for sure".

Even if, as you say, the estimate is 100hours per person. How much time does the average person spend on the phone? My current cell plan has 200 minutes per month, and I never go over. Say the average person spends 1000 minutes (16.7 hours), that means you could store a month of rolling phone conversations, and be only at 16.7% capacity. That leaves a fair bit of extra room for persons of interest internationally.

Re: NSA Collects 'Word for Word' Every Domestic Communication, Says Former Analyst

#105

Post by fixxer »

logn wrote: post #77
fixxer wrote: post #8

Nice to see somebody pointing out the obvious bullshit regarding the Utah facility's real purpose (content storage, not metadata). What kind of iron do you need to run NLP on a day's worth of content (let's limit "content" to voice transcriptions from phone calls)? Suppose I want to pick out "bomb" in near real-time? How many $billions for total information awareness? Even the best algo is going to produce false posi…

http://www.governmentcontractswon.com

I might have to scrape this...

Re: NSA Collects 'Word for Word' Every Domestic Communication, Says Former Analyst

#106

Post by codex »

Should this turn out to be true, the legal rationale is likely that a warrant is only need to read a communication, not to collect it. So "they" archive everything and then promise to look at it only when legal to do so. The NSA can even record American citizens if they promise not to read the data if it turns out to be an American they've recorded (unless the FBI wants the data, of course).

Even if this promise holds, though, people may dislike this policy, to put it mildly. If a robot takes a naked picture of me, it's an invasion of privacy even if no human ever looks at it.

Re: NSA Collects 'Word for Word' Every Domestic Communication, Says Former Analyst

#107

Post by espeed »

rcthompson wrote: post #101
espeed wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a question I've been pondering: Did the NSA want PRISM to leak? Having everyone in the world know that someone is watching will have significant sociological effects. It is akin to the idea that "God is watching". Thousands of years ago the fear of God and promise of reward was the carrot and stick that resulted in people working together for the greater good rather than pursuing self interest. It was the invi…

I'm sorry to say that pretty much all the biological examples and analogies you give are either wrong or at best controversial and not widely accepted. Bacteria do not group to form mitochondria; mitochondria do not group to form cells. Mitochondra don't even cooperate "willingly" with their host cells, but rather the host cell must incentivize them by withholding essential nutrients from the "slackers" until they sh…

> I'm sorry to say that pretty much all the biological examples and analogies you give are either wrong or at best controversial and not widely accepted.

Many in today's foreign policy circles agree with Haidt's analogies -- see Foreign Policy's "Top 100 Global Thinkers in 2012" (http://www.foreignpolicy.com/2012globalthinkers?wp_login_red...).

Controversial or not, if policy makers hold the idea, it may be sufficient to justify/sell the strategy. And since when has universal buy-in been prerequisite to a course of action?

> Bacteria do not group to form mitochondria;

"The Evolution of the Cell" (http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/begin/cells/organelle...)

"Cells within cells: An extraordinary claim with extraordinary evidence" (http://undsci.berkeley.edu/lessons/pdfs/endosymbiosis.pdf)

Mitochondrion Origin (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrion#Origin)

Endosymbiotic Theory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endosymbiotic_theory)

> mitochondria do not group to form cells.

Eukaroyte (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eukaryote) vs. Prokaryote (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prokaryote)

> Mitochondra don't even cooperate "willingly" with their host cells, but rather the host cell must incentivize them by withholding essential nutrients from the "slackers" until they shape up.

Haidt uses the term "freeloaders" instead of "slackers", but incentivizing the freeloaders to "shape up" is exactly the point of the analogy.

> I'm not familiar with Jonathan Haidt's work, so I can't comment directly on that

All of his writings and talks touch on it, but here's a good overview:

"Jonathan Haidt: Religion, evolution, and the ecstasy of self-transcendence" (http://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_humanity_s_stairway_...)

Papers & Citatations (http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=VafYYacAAAAJ&hl=en)

Google Tech Talk: "Hive Psychology and the Moral Life of Organizations" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2APK3tlPL_0)

> The concepts of entropy and order don't really apply in a social system.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_entropy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_entropy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_and_life

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(disambiguation)

> In many industries the only stable equilibrium is a monopoly [2], which is arguably the least entropic "market state" possible. The "optimal" market according to capitalism is perfect competition among a large number of small independent firms, which is arguably the maximum-entropy state. So it seems that increased entropy should be a good thing.

It's about balance. Unrestrained corporate growth in its current form is unsustainable to the biosphere. We have limited natural resources. What's good for one group may be detrimental to the whole.

> The word "prism" has a mathematical meaning and a physical meaning, and I think it's pretty clear that when the NSA called their spying program PRISM, they were invoking the physical meaning of a tool.

I don't know how you can argue anything the NSA does is "pretty clear." Look up doctrinal meaning vs literal meaning, or double entendre (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_entendre).

Re: NSA Collects 'Word for Word' Every Domestic Communication, Says Former Analyst

#108

Post by espeed »

northwest wrote: post #76
espeed wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a question I've been pondering: Did the NSA want PRISM to leak? Having everyone in the world know that someone is watching will have significant sociological effects. It is akin to the idea that "God is watching". Thousands of years ago the fear of God and promise of reward was the carrot and stick that resulted in people working together for the greater good rather than pursuing self interest. It was the invi…

They certainly know that sooner or later things risk coming to light. But it seems more likely that they would have preferred to have this leak and its accompanying chilling effect happen at a later date, when they can be sure that everybody is under their control and their power structure could not be brought down anymore.

> They certainly know that sooner or later things risk coming to light.

General Michael Hayden, former head of NSA, said essentially that on Face the Nation a few weeks ago:

  One of the results of the Snowden leaks is that it
  launched a national debate about the balance between
  privacy and security. 

  I'm convinced the more the American people know exactly 
  what it is we are doing in this balance between privacy 
  and security -- the more they know -- the more comfortable 
  they will feel. 

  So frankly I think we ought to be doing a bit more to 
  explain what it is we're doing, why, and the very tight 
  safeguards under which we are operating.

  ...

  Here's how I do the math. In an ideal world, I would 
  keep all of this secret because any of it that I make 
  public slices some of my operational advantage away from
  me. 

  But here's what I've learned heading up both NSA and CIA.
  You may be able to do one thing one-off based upon narrow
  legalness and the President's authorization, but in
  democracies like ours don't get to do something over a
  long period of time without national consensus. 

  So I'm willing to shave points off of my operational 
  effectiveness in order to make the American people a bit
  more comfortable about what it is we're doing; otherwise, 
  the American people won't let us do it in the first place.
CBS: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpfwjI9Eqy4

Re: NSA Collects 'Word for Word' Every Domestic Communication, Says Former Analyst

#109

Post by acqq »

kennywinker wrote: post #104
acqq wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's not "nobody knows for sure." If you do the right math and don't assume that they have the storage technology not available to the rest of the world (which is a reasonable assumption) it's obvious that the data storage in an accessible way inside that center has an upper bound of an order of around one exabyte (1e18) (a million terabytes). So it's even more probable that it's less, say 0.2 EB. Now somebody he…

You seem very confident of your input parameters. What are you basing 0.2-1EB on? It seems like there is a lot unknown about the utah data center, so all their "expert estimates" sounded more like guesses. Hence my conclusion "nobody knows for sure". Even if, as you say, the estimate is 100hours per person. How much time does the average person spend on the phone? My current cell plan has 200 minutes per month, and I…

Your estimate is correct, somewhere on HN I've read that average young American talks 20 hours per month, older somewhat less. You're also correct that as soon as they decide that not everybody is actually important, the capacity to store communications of "persons of interest" is enough for "the whole life of the persons of interest."

Regarding my estimates, somebody here on HN also sent a link to the highest capacity automated tape libraries, and using them instead of hard disks the estimation of capacity still fits in the same order of magnitude. I still assume hard disks are more convenient than tapes for anything that needs to be accessed "when needed" (who would accept to say "will get the data bout the terrorists regarding the attack tomorrow, but it will take two days." So I can even bet that the main storage there are hard disks.

Re: NSA Collects 'Word for Word' Every Domestic Communication, Says Former Analyst

#110

Post by LekkoscPiwa »

northwest wrote: post #67
LekkoscPiwa wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, doesn't make sense. According to this fighting nazism while being German wouldn't have make sense in 1930s because you pay taxes.

What I mean is: We also need to start getting rid of the root of the problem, not only try to fight some symptoms (patching holes is OK for the short term).

Again, similar to Nazi Germany in 1930s. If you have a democratic society where 90% voters are against freedom and vote for all the wars are in favor of all the BS -- there is only this much you can do.
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