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>The NSA is incapable of building the type of mass surveillance infastructure we see today. That infrastructure is built and maintained by private tech companie

by soup10 4y ago

>The NSA is incapable of building the type of mass surveillance infastructure we see today. That infrastructure is built and maintained by private tech companies. This is false, the snowden releases showed they have extensive infrastructure that aggregates data from many different sources.

ethbr0 4y ago
Parent's point is that any NSA system falls far short (in comprehensiveness and freshness) of what Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple have (in addition to their analogs in other countries). At the end of the day, worldwide profit scales systems faster than even national security dollars.
- soup10 4y ago
  And parent's point is wrong, because A) the NSA has broader legal powers to collect and use data, and B) the NSA's mission is literally signal intelligence. They aren't in the business of making phones or serving ads. Of course without inside knowledge of how companies are collecting and using data and what exactly the NSA is doing there's no way to know for sure. But the public revelations of what the NSA are doing go far beyond what we've heard tech companies are doing.
  - gizmo686 4y ago
    Yet it was private companies that managed to get almost everyone to carry around a microphone, video camera, accelerometer, gps device which they also use to store and transmit the majority of their personal conversations. Granted, they do not snoop on you to the maximum extent the hardware of these devices allow. But, take a look at [0]. Unless you are one of the few people who goes out of their way to limit tracking, do you think that the NSA would be able to get that detailed tracking of everyone's movements. And this is just the obvious part (which Google is nice enough to share with its users as a feature). Big tech companies have also built detailed models of most people's interests; which is simply not possible without the large amount of data that comes from people actually interacting with them. All of the NSA's dragnet surveillance is built on the back of private industry, and works because that private industry has convinced people to participate in it. [0] https://www.google.com/maps/timeline https://www.google.com/maps/timeline
    - soup10 4y ago
      It's true that state surveillance infrastructure is mostly built on top of civilian infrastructure, the original post just made it sound like the NSA didn't have its own enormous datacenters and wasn't slurping and processing an extraordinary amount of data.

by soup10 4y ago

ethbr0 4y ago

Parent's point is that any NSA system falls far short (in comprehensiveness and freshness) of what Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple have (in addition to their analogs in other countries). At the end of the day, worldwide profit scales systems faster than even national security dollars.

soup10 4y ago
And parent's point is wrong, because A) the NSA has broader legal powers to collect and use data, and B) the NSA's mission is literally signal intelligence. They aren't in the business of making phones or serving ads. Of course without inside knowledge of how companies are collecting and using data and what exactly the NSA is doing there's no way to know for sure. But the public revelations of what the NSA are doing go far beyond what we've heard tech companies are doing.
- gizmo686 4y ago
  Yet it was private companies that managed to get almost everyone to carry around a microphone, video camera, accelerometer, gps device which they also use to store and transmit the majority of their personal conversations. Granted, they do not snoop on you to the maximum extent the hardware of these devices allow. But, take a look at [0]. Unless you are one of the few people who goes out of their way to limit tracking, do you think that the NSA would be able to get that detailed tracking of everyone's movements. And this is just the obvious part (which Google is nice enough to share with its users as a feature). Big tech companies have also built detailed models of most people's interests; which is simply not possible without the large amount of data that comes from people actually interacting with them. All of the NSA's dragnet surveillance is built on the back of private industry, and works because that private industry has convinced people to participate in it. [0] https://www.google.com/maps/timeline https://www.google.com/maps/timeline
  - soup10 4y ago
    It's true that state surveillance infrastructure is mostly built on top of civilian infrastructure, the original post just made it sound like the NSA didn't have its own enormous datacenters and wasn't slurping and processing an extraordinary amount of data.