6 ms·

Note that this is just records of some of the federal agencies, not all of them, according to the linked ACLU report: > "Although the litigation is ongoing, we

Note that this is just records of some of the federal agencies, not all of them, according to the linked ACLU report: > "Although the litigation is ongoing, we are now making public the records that CBP, ICE, the U.S. Secret Service, the U.S. Coast Guard, and several offices within DHS Headquarters have provided us to date." The NSA is still vacuuming up all the metadata and a good fraction of the content from the main nodes where it put those fiber-optic cable splitters on the main trunk lines what, 20 years ago or so? Under the Patriot Act provisions, pushed through Congress in late October 2001 wasn't it? Just a few days after the Senate got shut down by those anthrax letter attacks sent to Daschle and Leahy (no, it wasn't Bruce Ivins). Then you've got the backdoors into Google and Apple, the whole PRISM thing... I doubt they've shut any of that down. See Yasha Levine's "Surveillance Valley" for more on that. https://yashalevine.com/surveillance-valley https://yashalevine.com/surveillance-valley It's not quite China yet, but I'm pretty sure that when our politicians and bureaucrats and their corporate masters look at China's system, their main emotion is one of envy.

ok_dad 4y ago
Funny thing is, they started the surveillance in late-2001 to suck all the records up. Where did they get the computers and storage devices to do that all at once? They must have been installing equipment for months or years, especially since I am pretty sure they even built a new data center on Fort Mead for it around that time. Now, this is 2001, when building a datacenter didn't just involve spinning up 1000 AWS EC2's and opening the spigot to S3, so this type of thing would have taken some time. So the question is: did they pass a law to allow data collection because of 9/11 and other attacks, or did they pass a law because they wanted the NSA to be able to collect this data using computer systems they had been planning for years, and used those attacks as a pretext?
- lstodd 4y ago
  Remember the Clipper chip from 1993? It's not like they suddenly started it in 2001.
- vorpalhex 4y ago
  I legit don't believe they can store all that data. Youtube alone creates too much data for them to process and handle. They must be storing either a subset or only partial metadata.
  - specto 4y ago
    likely netflow data.
  - calvinmorrison 4y ago
    with large datasets like bioinformatics you often compress the data by extracting features and building matrixes, then only keeping things that score above a threshold
    - Scoundreller 4y ago
      Sounds right. I like to say we’re all on a list and it just matters where you rank on it. And the precision is only good when you rank high on it. No different than google search results. The accuracy of the 7th page of results just doesn’t matter.
  - getcrunk 4y ago
    I mean more than a few x00 someones have to actually know the answer to that question. Shocked it hasn't been leaked.
  - perrylaj 4y ago
    I'm on the other side of the fence - I believe they can store all they need to. Backdoors into Google, AWS, and others were strongly hinted at if not fully exposed with all the leaks back in the Snowden days, so US Agencies may not even need to store some of the bulky stuff. But given the vast size and number of datacenters operated by US agencies, it seems likely they have a LOT of storage capacity. http://worldstopdatacenters.com/government-data-centers/ http://worldstopdatacenters.com/government-data-centers/
  - eointierney 4y ago
    I legit believe they store everything they can because they've been doing exactly this for longer than anyone else. They are _the_ experts in metadata management.
- bombcar 4y ago
  I would suspect it was already being done (in part, or in whole who knows) and the attacks were an excuse to "legitimize" it going forward.
  - kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
    It was definitely being done before 9/11. I know of one data broker who was under contract with a certain TLA in the 90's to perform hardware assisted rapid data scanning.
- StanislavPetrov 4y ago
  >Funny thing is, they started the surveillance in late-2001 to suck all the records up. It started long, long before 2001. Here is a 2000 press release from the ACLU about global surveillance done by Echelon, which had already been ongoing for years (back when the ACLU cared about privacy issues): https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/privacy-advocates-concerned-about-echelon https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/privacy-advocates-concer... By 1999 privacy advocates at already gotten together for an official "jam Echelon day". >It was the latest in a long line of apparently futile online protest movements. On Thursday October 21 1999, internet users were urged to drop trigger words into their email so as to overwhelm Echelon, the massive surveillance project which is said to keep track of all electronic communications into and out of the USA, the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. https://techmonitor.ai/technology/did_jam_echelon_day_do_more_than_make_the_nsa_laugh https://techmonitor.ai/technology/did_jam_echelon_day_do_mor...
  - amatecha 4y ago
    Ah right, I remember when Echelon Watch[0] was launched, and made the rounds in chat rooms I frequented at the time... Of course most people dismissed it as conspiracy theory stuff :) [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20001018103147/http://www.echelonwatch.org/ https://web.archive.org/web/20001018103147/http://www.echelo...
- colordrops 4y ago
  I recall some natural disaster in Thailand being blamed for a hard drive shortage at the time, when it ended up being the NSA buying them all up for their Utah data center. Edit: anyone downvoting want to comment on why this is implausible or not noteworthy to mention? It was a topic of discussion at the time.
  - ReactiveJelly 4y ago
    Source? Would love to hear about this. I searched for "thailand hard drive shortage nsa" and only got... 2013 Nov, Backblaze's annual hard drive report still only blamed the flooding: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/farming-hard-drives-2-years-and-1m-later/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/farming-hard-drives-2-years-a... 2015, Tech Power-Up has a story about NSA malware hidden in hard drive firmware: https://www.techpowerup.com/209925/nsa-hides-spying-backdoors-into-hard-drive-firmware?cp=5 https://www.techpowerup.com/209925/nsa-hides-spying-backdoor...
    - colordrops 4y ago
      I don't recall where I heard it but found this in a quick search: https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/li1pep/a_global_hard_drive_shortage_occurred_at_the_same/ https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/li1pep/a_global...
- landemva 4y ago
  Insider Bill Binney tried to do responsible data collection. He got harassed. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JvAflFcpJFQ https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JvAflFcpJFQ
tremon 4y ago
It's not quite China yet What do you mean with this, specifically? Do you mean that China has a more comprehensive data collection apparatus, that the Chinese government has easier access to commercially collected data, or maybe that they exert their control more overtly than the US?
- Ozzie_osman 4y ago
  Yes.
  - trasz 4y ago
    [citation needed]
candiddevmike 4y ago
And yet, even with all of this surveillance, we still have mass shootings every five days.
- shrubble 4y ago
  Only "nobodies" get shot. Funny how they never target any politicians, huh?
  - seneca 4y ago
    > Funny how they never target any politicians, huh? They do. Here are a couple recent examples: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Tucson_shooting https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Tucson_shooting https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_baseball_shooting https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_baseball_shoot...
- ta988 4y ago
  Judging by what is done (and what is not done) to remedy them, they sound more like a feature than a bug of our society unfortunately. People are able to storm political institutions when they are angry about an election, but just buy more weapons when their kids get killed. Go figure.
- PuppyTailWags 4y ago
  My understanding is that in the vast majority of these mass shooting cases, authorities are well aware of the danger but there's no enforcement mechanism for "probably going to do a mass shooting".
  - Schroedingersat 4y ago
    Yeah there is. It's called not paying to bombard them with great replacement conspiracy theories all for a decade and instead paying twice as many teachers as well as getting dedicated mental health staff.
    - 4y ago
RyEgswuCsn 4y ago
> It's not quite China yet, I'd call it a decentrailized surveillance system --- very robust against any attempt to dismantle it.
TrapLord_Rhodo 4y ago
>It's not quite China yet, but I'm pretty sure that when our politicians and bureaucrats and their corporate masters look at China's system, their main emotion is one of envy. The US has a much wider intellegence reach and surveillance, not only on our own citizens but on the worlds.
lern_too_spel 4y ago
There are no "backdoors into Google and Apple." The government has to request specific accounts' data with a court order. The NSA isn't "vacuuming up all the metadata and a good fraction of the content from the main nodes." It does full take in some countries with national security interest and collects data to or from some endpoints outside the US known to belong to foreigners with a court order. We know all of this from the documents Snowden leaked and the documents the government declassified.
- VistaBrokeMyPC 4y ago
  That "court order" is from the FISA court, which may as well be a monkey with a rubber stamp. We learned that from the Snowden documents too.
  - throwaway0a5e 4y ago
    They only call it a court for marketing reasons. It's basically just an internal review process.
  - lern_too_spel 4y ago
    No, we learned that they were approved at roughly the same rate as other search court orders. Investigators aren't going to spend the time making an application for a court order unless it has a very high chance of being granted. https://www.quora.com/What-percent-of-law-enforcement-search-warrants-are-issued/answer/Al-Saibini?ch=15&oid=72038762&share=eb62cad6&srid=B0HV&target_type=answer https://www.quora.com/What-percent-of-law-enforcement-search...
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

ok_dad 4y ago

Funny thing is, they started the surveillance in late-2001 to suck all the records up. Where did they get the computers and storage devices to do that all at once? They must have been installing equipment for months or years, especially since I am pretty sure they even built a new data center on Fort Mead for it around that time. Now, this is 2001, when building a datacenter didn't just involve spinning up 1000 AWS EC2's and opening the spigot to S3, so this type of thing would have taken some time. So the question is: did they pass a law to allow data collection because of 9/11 and other attacks, or did they pass a law because they wanted the NSA to be able to collect this data using computer systems they had been planning for years, and used those attacks as a pretext?

lstodd 4y ago
Remember the Clipper chip from 1993? It's not like they suddenly started it in 2001.
vorpalhex 4y ago
I legit don't believe they can store all that data. Youtube alone creates too much data for them to process and handle. They must be storing either a subset or only partial metadata.
- specto 4y ago
  likely netflow data.
- calvinmorrison 4y ago
  with large datasets like bioinformatics you often compress the data by extracting features and building matrixes, then only keeping things that score above a threshold
  - Scoundreller 4y ago
    Sounds right. I like to say we’re all on a list and it just matters where you rank on it. And the precision is only good when you rank high on it. No different than google search results. The accuracy of the 7th page of results just doesn’t matter.
- getcrunk 4y ago
  I mean more than a few x00 someones have to actually know the answer to that question. Shocked it hasn't been leaked.
- perrylaj 4y ago
  I'm on the other side of the fence - I believe they can store all they need to. Backdoors into Google, AWS, and others were strongly hinted at if not fully exposed with all the leaks back in the Snowden days, so US Agencies may not even need to store some of the bulky stuff. But given the vast size and number of datacenters operated by US agencies, it seems likely they have a LOT of storage capacity. http://worldstopdatacenters.com/government-data-centers/ http://worldstopdatacenters.com/government-data-centers/
- eointierney 4y ago
  I legit believe they store everything they can because they've been doing exactly this for longer than anyone else. They are _the_ experts in metadata management.
bombcar 4y ago
I would suspect it was already being done (in part, or in whole who knows) and the attacks were an excuse to "legitimize" it going forward.
- kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
  It was definitely being done before 9/11. I know of one data broker who was under contract with a certain TLA in the 90's to perform hardware assisted rapid data scanning.
StanislavPetrov 4y ago
>Funny thing is, they started the surveillance in late-2001 to suck all the records up. It started long, long before 2001. Here is a 2000 press release from the ACLU about global surveillance done by Echelon, which had already been ongoing for years (back when the ACLU cared about privacy issues): https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/privacy-advocates-concerned-about-echelon https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/privacy-advocates-concer... By 1999 privacy advocates at already gotten together for an official "jam Echelon day". >It was the latest in a long line of apparently futile online protest movements. On Thursday October 21 1999, internet users were urged to drop trigger words into their email so as to overwhelm Echelon, the massive surveillance project which is said to keep track of all electronic communications into and out of the USA, the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. https://techmonitor.ai/technology/did_jam_echelon_day_do_more_than_make_the_nsa_laugh https://techmonitor.ai/technology/did_jam_echelon_day_do_mor...
- amatecha 4y ago
  Ah right, I remember when Echelon Watch[0] was launched, and made the rounds in chat rooms I frequented at the time... Of course most people dismissed it as conspiracy theory stuff :) [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20001018103147/http://www.echelonwatch.org/ https://web.archive.org/web/20001018103147/http://www.echelo...
colordrops 4y ago
I recall some natural disaster in Thailand being blamed for a hard drive shortage at the time, when it ended up being the NSA buying them all up for their Utah data center. Edit: anyone downvoting want to comment on why this is implausible or not noteworthy to mention? It was a topic of discussion at the time.
- ReactiveJelly 4y ago
  Source? Would love to hear about this. I searched for "thailand hard drive shortage nsa" and only got... 2013 Nov, Backblaze's annual hard drive report still only blamed the flooding: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/farming-hard-drives-2-years-and-1m-later/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/farming-hard-drives-2-years-a... 2015, Tech Power-Up has a story about NSA malware hidden in hard drive firmware: https://www.techpowerup.com/209925/nsa-hides-spying-backdoors-into-hard-drive-firmware?cp=5 https://www.techpowerup.com/209925/nsa-hides-spying-backdoor...
  - colordrops 4y ago
    I don't recall where I heard it but found this in a quick search: https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/li1pep/a_global_hard_drive_shortage_occurred_at_the_same/ https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/li1pep/a_global...
landemva 4y ago
Insider Bill Binney tried to do responsible data collection. He got harassed. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JvAflFcpJFQ https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JvAflFcpJFQ

tremon 4y ago

It's not quite China yet What do you mean with this, specifically? Do you mean that China has a more comprehensive data collection apparatus, that the Chinese government has easier access to commercially collected data, or maybe that they exert their control more overtly than the US?

Ozzie_osman 4y ago
Yes.
- trasz 4y ago
  [citation needed]

candiddevmike 4y ago

And yet, even with all of this surveillance, we still have mass shootings every five days.

shrubble 4y ago
Only "nobodies" get shot. Funny how they never target any politicians, huh?
- seneca 4y ago
  > Funny how they never target any politicians, huh? They do. Here are a couple recent examples: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Tucson_shooting https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Tucson_shooting https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_baseball_shooting https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_baseball_shoot...
ta988 4y ago
Judging by what is done (and what is not done) to remedy them, they sound more like a feature than a bug of our society unfortunately. People are able to storm political institutions when they are angry about an election, but just buy more weapons when their kids get killed. Go figure.
PuppyTailWags 4y ago
My understanding is that in the vast majority of these mass shooting cases, authorities are well aware of the danger but there's no enforcement mechanism for "probably going to do a mass shooting".
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  Yeah there is. It's called not paying to bombard them with great replacement conspiracy theories all for a decade and instead paying twice as many teachers as well as getting dedicated mental health staff.
  - 4y ago

RyEgswuCsn 4y ago

> It's not quite China yet, I'd call it a decentrailized surveillance system --- very robust against any attempt to dismantle it.

TrapLord_Rhodo 4y ago

>It's not quite China yet, but I'm pretty sure that when our politicians and bureaucrats and their corporate masters look at China's system, their main emotion is one of envy. The US has a much wider intellegence reach and surveillance, not only on our own citizens but on the worlds.

lern_too_spel 4y ago

There are no "backdoors into Google and Apple." The government has to request specific accounts' data with a court order. The NSA isn't "vacuuming up all the metadata and a good fraction of the content from the main nodes." It does full take in some countries with national security interest and collects data to or from some endpoints outside the US known to belong to foreigners with a court order. We know all of this from the documents Snowden leaked and the documents the government declassified.

VistaBrokeMyPC 4y ago
That "court order" is from the FISA court, which may as well be a monkey with a rubber stamp. We learned that from the Snowden documents too.
- throwaway0a5e 4y ago
  They only call it a court for marketing reasons. It's basically just an internal review process.
- lern_too_spel 4y ago
  No, we learned that they were approved at roughly the same rate as other search court orders. Investigators aren't going to spend the time making an application for a court order unless it has a very high chance of being granted. https://www.quora.com/What-percent-of-law-enforcement-search-warrants-are-issued/answer/Al-Saibini?ch=15&oid=72038762&share=eb62cad6&srid=B0HV&target_type=answer https://www.quora.com/What-percent-of-law-enforcement-search...

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]