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NGOs aren't used by intelligence agencies as a means of boosting signal intelligence, they're used as a means of boosting human intelligence. NGOs tend to have

NGOs aren't used by intelligence agencies as a means of boosting signal intelligence, they're used as a means of boosting human intelligence. NGOs tend to have overlapping members and social circles as grassroots organizations. They don't need to gather cell phone signal intelligence, they can just ask their staffers "what do you think of these protests?" Different threat vector entirely.

SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
> Different threat vector entirely. My point was exactly that it's a different threat to have them have to collect human intelligence from NGOs rather than have every text message, phone call, email, etc from and up-to-the-minute location data on every person they're looking for intel on. I don't care if the CIA can call up every NGO on the globe and talk to 50 different people there to get 50,000 reports on the current civil unrest across the globe, collate them down in to usable intelligence, and present that to our leaders. That's literally their job. They should do that. Lots of that. All of it they can. (I would be shocked if the CIA didn't already heavily extract intelligence from NGOs.) It's just a completely different scale from being about to know where every person is minute-by-minute, and everything they say, text, email, read online, etc. forever, to be looked up and cross-referenced whenever you need. Particularly because the conversations with NGOs have to focus on targets of interest, while they can literally just watch every phone and digital transaction. All of them. All the time. So I'll be blunt: you guys are just wrong that them being able to get any kind of intelligence from NGOs, be it sigint or humint, that would make up for the firehose of digital exchanges being shut down or rendered useless.