America: Near Total Surveillance State

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VMI77
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America: Near Total Surveillance State

#1

Post by VMI77 »

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/0 ... nter/all/1

The former NSA official held his thumb and forefinger close together: “We are that far from a turnkey totalitarian state.”
In the process—and for the first time since Watergate and the other scandals of the Nixon administration—the NSA has turned its surveillance apparatus on the US and its citizens. It has established listening posts throughout the nation to collect and sift through billions of email messages and phone calls, whether they originate within the country or overseas. It has created a supercomputer of almost unimaginable speed to look for patterns and unscramble codes. Finally, the agency has begun building a place to store all the trillions of words and thoughts and whispers captured in its electronic net. And, of course, it’s all being done in secret. To those on the inside, the old adage that NSA stands for Never Say Anything applies more than ever.

He explains that the agency could have installed its tapping gear at the nation’s cable landing stations—the more than two dozen sites on the periphery of the US where fiber-optic cables come ashore. If it had taken that route, the NSA would have been able to limit its eavesdropping to just international communications, which at the time was all that was allowed under US law. Instead it chose to put the wiretapping rooms at key junction points throughout the country—large, windowless buildings known as switches—thus gaining access to not just international communications but also to most of the domestic traffic flowing through the US. The network of intercept stations goes far beyond the single room in an AT&T building in San Francisco exposed by a whistle-blower in 2006. “I think there’s 10 to 20 of them,” Binney says. “That’s not just San Francisco; they have them in the middle of the country and also on the East Coast.”

Binney says Stellar Wind was far larger than has been publicly disclosed and included not just eavesdropping on domestic phone calls but the inspection of domestic email. At the outset the program recorded 320 million calls a day, he says, which represented about 73 to 80 percent of the total volume of the agency’s worldwide intercepts. The haul only grew from there. According to Binney—who has maintained close contact with agency employees until a few years ago—the taps in the secret rooms dotting the country are actually powered by highly sophisticated software programs that conduct “deep packet inspection,” examining Internet traffic as it passes through the 10-gigabit-per-second cables at the speed of light.
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Kadelic
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Re: America: Near Total Surveillance State

#2

Post by Kadelic »

What actions should we take regarding this revelation?
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VMI77
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Re: America: Near Total Surveillance State

#3

Post by VMI77 »

Kadelic wrote:What actions should we take regarding this revelation?
Wish I knew. Vote in a 99% new Congress is about all I can come up with.
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Re: America: Near Total Surveillance State

#4

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I don't at all advocate a nanny state, but people would just go lo-fi, low tech. "The hedgehog flies at midnight!" and when someone asks what it means, "nothin'."
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Re: America: Near Total Surveillance State

#5

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Chilling.... Not surprising.... Chilling.
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Re: America: Near Total Surveillance State

#6

Post by i8godzilla »

If you want to read a first-hand account of working at NSA read The Puzzle Palace. Although written over 25 years ago during the Cold War, you may gain some insight of the mentality of agency. The author of the book got away with quite a bit in publishing the book. He dared the Federal Government to prosecute him and prove the information in the book was true. We were even briefed that the only comments about the book we could give was the standard, "I can neither confirm or deny..........".

(I spent almost 10 years in Military Intelligence during my military service. All of this was spent in either field operations assignments or actual duty at the agency. Best and worst job I ever had!)
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Re: America: Near Total Surveillance State

#7

Post by mamabearCali »

My grandad worked coms for the army during the Korean war. He said unless you are talking one on one to another person it ain't private, and even then he said you can't be too sure. Mind you that was the 1950's.
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Re: America: Near Total Surveillance State

#8

Post by stroo »

I have done privacy work for 15 years. Unless you go off and live on a mountain with no contact with anyone else there is no such thing a privacy. And it is getting worse.

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Re: America: Near Total Surveillance State

#9

Post by rm9792 »

This is old info but new to most people. In the late 1990s I worked in the Houston 5E switch surveillance center for ATT. We knew all about Echelon, CALEA, etc. Contrary to what TV portrays we did wiretapping via software. It is impossible to know you are being wiretapped by the feds. The tap simply copies the feed to your phone to a record or another line. The signal is never diverted or "touched". They are right about the large windowless buildings. Quite a few times i have stayed in one during a hurricane. I think those buildings are nigh indestructible.

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Re: America: Near Total Surveillance State

#10

Post by magillapd »

ATT has one of those windowless buildings right around the corner from my house...hmmm

OMG NOW THEY KNOW THAT I KNOW THAT I LIVE RIGHT AROUND THE CORNER FROM ONE!!!!! :eek6 :leaving
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Re: America: Near Total Surveillance State

#11

Post by Dave2 »

magillapd wrote:ATT has one of those windowless buildings right around the corner from my house...hmmm

OMG NOW THEY KNOW THAT I KNOW THAT I LIVE RIGHT AROUND THE CORNER FROM ONE!!!!! :eek6 :leaving
I'm pretty sure they already knew that...
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Re: America: Near Total Surveillance State

#12

Post by rm9792 »

Those buildings are usually about 90% empty space. Equipment has shrunk along with other electronics. My office is the only thing on an entire second floor of one of these buildings. I would love a window....
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Re: America: Near Total Surveillance State

#13

Post by sjfcontrol »

VMI77 wrote:
In the process—and for the first time since Watergate and the other scandals of the Nixon administration—the NSA has turned its surveillance apparatus on the US and its citizens. It has established listening posts throughout the nation to collect and sift through billions of email messages and phone calls, whether they originate within the country or overseas. It has created a supercomputer of almost unimaginable speed to look for patterns and unscramble codes. Finally, the agency has begun building a place to store all the trillions of words and thoughts and whispers captured in its electronic net. And, of course, it’s all being done in secret. To those on the inside, the old adage that NSA stands for Never Say Anything applies more than ever.
I've seen this show. "Person of Interest" on CBS, Thursdays at 8 central. Not a bad show... :evil2:
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VMI77
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Re: America: Near Total Surveillance State

#14

Post by VMI77 »

Kabong30 wrote:I don't at all advocate a nanny state, but people would just go lo-fi, low tech. "The hedgehog flies at midnight!" and when someone asks what it means, "nothin'."

Unless you're independently wealthy I don't see how lo-tech is going to buy you much avoidance. The problem with this isn't so much in the now, but how the information WILL be abused in the future. I suggest the German film, "The Lives of Others" for some very clear insight into that. But for example.....we're already approaching a cashless society. In Italy someplace they recently made it illegal to use cash. With everything monitored and tracked, how are you going to buy groceries if you're on the "no buy" list, or, let's say, ammo, if you're on the "no buy" list for having "radical" views about gun ownership, or perhaps, more realistically, you're refused a purchase because you've already bought your ammo quota for the year? How about when Michelle gets to tell you what is healthy for you to eat, and the pizza place tells you you've already consumed your pizza quota for the month? Or your Obamacare premiums go up because you've got bad DNA?
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Re: America: Near Total Surveillance State

#15

Post by RoyGBiv »

So is PGP and other similar shared hey encryption at all useful against government spying?

Or.... Would using such software just serve to make one a.target for further scrutiny?
I am not a lawyer. This is NOT legal advice.!
Nothing tempers idealism quite like the cold bath of reality.... SQLGeek
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