It’s clear by now that the NSA’s goal is to achieve total information awareness. I think that’s understandable, in a way. It’s basically their job to figure out how to eavesdrop on everything, always, with only some slim statutory carve-outs protecting the privacy of American citizens. I think it’s up to Congress to decide how much is enough, because the NSA isn’t going to restrain themselves. In the absence of being (very) specifically prohibited from gathering certain kinds of information, they will make every effort to gather it.
It goes without saying that if the NSA records every single phone call in a country for an entire month, that they will be able to utilize that information retrospectively to gather intelligence about new targets. So, they’ve built that capability for at least one (unnamed) country. Should they be allowed to keep it?
Can they keep the capability on the shelf, unused, in preparation for an actual declared war?
The surveillance level has grown to a ridiculous level, and some boundaries need to be created. Not to mention two more things:
1) I hope the country wasn’t Russia, because we shouldn’t be surprised by anything a country does if we’re listening to every single one of their phone calls, and
2) Can you imagine how much the world hates the idea that they can’t use their phones without our government potentially recording everything they have to say?
All this, and they still can’t find that damn airplane.
Judging from the information coming out so far and because it is the easiest to do, that country is likely the USA.
But they’re only storing it. They’re not listening to your phone calls.
Time to undo the Truman authorization of the Cold War and the authorization for the Global War on Terror.
If you have war without end, you have total information awareness because you never know who’s going to attack you.
If it’s not the USA and just a prototype, the Vatican would be a convenient test case of the technology.
The article makes it very clear that it is not the USA.
It might be Iran. It might be North Korea. It might be Russia. It might be Syria. It might be Iraq. It might Egypt. It might be Saudi Arabia. At this point, it may be as many as six of them.
Of those the only one that really makes sense is Saudi Arabia. Most of the others require only monitoring the leadership. What country requires monitoring the entire population? Well, Afghanistan but how widespread is phone usage.
The article must assert that it is not the USA because the source wants to assert that they are working within the law. Given what’s come out in the last 10 months, NSA needs to provide proof of that assertion.
Some place small to demonstrate proof of concept. Preferably English speaker because automated translators aren’t very good. A place that doesn’t much mind US incursions into its space. A place this would work.
I was guessing Jamaica or Trinidad (that was pretty clearly where they were spying on the porn habits of Muslim clerics in November’s HuffPost revelation).
WAIT… maybe they’re onto something.. Hagel is out there stating today there is an increasing threat from our own people— he was referring to the incident at the naval yard near D.C. and similar recent incidents.
Of course lamestream media can’t report all that much on this; since it would be one more indicator of just how F***ed up our nation is.
Some might call that censorship. And folks in this country would be screaming if any Russian news agency withheld such information at the request of Putin.
I wouldn’t call that censorship since the Washington Post could have still printed the information but chose not to when the government asked them. I’m pretty sure that happens all the time and the media is few to refuse which they have done from time to time.
A free press would never seek government pre-clearance to print information/stories in its possession. A free press can decide on its own what to publish and not publish.
That would be a stupid, irresponsible press. Not a free one.
That depends on what they weighed in their decision.
So, only a press that publishes what is approved government is smart and responsible? But that wouldn’t be a free press would it?
it’s not about preclearance or approval they just asked them not to print it right away, the Washington Post was free to decline that request
I disagree with you. Lord knows I hate on Greenwald all the fucking time for being a gatekeeper, but here we have establishment media doing their due diligence to get the government to tell them what they should and should not do. it’s bullshit. If the media thinks the public shouldn’t know, that’s fine; there could be a damn good reason for why we shouldn’t know. But please, do not tell me “but Obama said!”
I can see you’re not a Orwell fan.
It probably is one of those sensitive countries like Russia or Iran, and that would actually explain a lot.
With that amount of information – 99% of it totally useless conversations about grandma’s baklava – our people would be so overwhelmed they wouldn’t know what end is up.
And… they could NOT stop two rubes from making pressure cooker bombs and wreaking havoc at a major U.S. sporting event.
FAIL. TOTAL FAIL.
really? that’s what you get from this story?
Oh, yeah… that’s right. LOL…
we the sappy taxpayers are paying what? $45 BILLION per year on our “security” agencies.. and not ONE of them is responsible for finding out about and stopping two amateur terrorists located right here; and this in spite of warnings from Russia.
FAIL.
The excuse is that they need more money for bigger and better computers and more and better data management programs. Then next time they’ll catch all those rubes with pressure cookers and box-cutters before they use them to cook a chicken or open a package from Amazon.
CORRECT:
it’s always “we need MORE money, more technology, more staff” blah, blah, blah.. the COST of which ultimately is sucking our Treasury dry.
weak, very weak.
It’s a seductive idea, that with just enough computing power one can be omniscient. That’s why it’s a popular topic of television shows. In the last few years there’s been several dramas that play on that idea, one of which I know is still going, “Person of Interest.” It may seem hard to fathom that people would make decisions about what to spend the treasury’s money on based on fantasies like that, but it appears to be the case.
Kevin Gosztola’s hunch is that the country is Pakistan and the rationale has to do with protecting Pakistan’s nuclear weapons industry and arsenal from being infiltrated by terrorists.
So there are some subset of 180 million people being monitored to find some potential threat activity. But because it is held for 30 days, that threat activity must be found after the fact based on other information. That’s how the NSA partitions the notions of seize and search. Although they try to pretend that information has not been seized until it has been searched.
If true, would be cheaper and more effective to keep paying off those in Pakistan that control that nuclear arsenal.
When has the military-intelligence-industrial complex done cheap and effective?
A suggestion for consideration by the US public at large and not the US MIC that prefers expensive and inefficient.
With every new revelation it is blindingly obvious that Dr. Frankenstein cannot control his monster any longer.
It might have been amusing to say Dr. Feinstein lost control of her monster, but the esteemed senator’s past failings and general uselessness to the Republic are certainly not the cause of the now grotesque surveillance state. She just became a bedazzled and willing dupe of it, a brainless enabler when we needed an actual statesman. Apparently, all our prezes become immediate captives of the creature, and the idea that the compliant courts (led by Roberts Repubs) would intervene to challenge the monster is comic. So all the branches of our government are flat on their backs, as usual.
What is interesting that the NSA monster cannot seem to stop the recurring leaks, which is the only encouraging aspect of the godawful mess. One can no longer claim they “didn’t know”. But as for new rules, while it is now well beyond argument that such are needed, they will not be forthcoming whatever the revelations, given that our country and government are fully and completely paralyzed. Presumably the monster is well aware of this, and works to ensure that such a situation continues.
Oh, “by now” it’s clear Booman? A bit late on the total information awareness train are we? I assume 99.9999999% of this data collection is pointless. Very much like spending hundreds of billions on “state of the art” fighter jets. They’re building up mountains of data but have almost no way to get “actionable” intelligence out of it in a timely or efficient manner. That’s why they’re frantically trying to get into “quantum” computing, so they can have a prayer of doing something with the yottabytes of data they are stockpiling.
So why are they doing it? Institutional empire building, feverishly sucking up tax money, bureaucratic CYA, careerist paranoia, etc., plus a healthy dose of that board of directors sociopathy which goes like this: we think we can, so we think we should.
Maybe if we can get the NRA to get agitated about this something would actually happen.