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The NSA info gathering program is still in it's infancy. People who have been paying attention (e.g. The EFF) have known the score for well over a decade. To a

The NSA info gathering program is still in it's infancy. People who have been paying attention (e.g. The EFF) have known the score for well over a decade. To answer your question: The NSA stores EVERYTHING, but they do not yet have the computational ability to parse everything and make sense out of those reams of data. They can certainly do this to some extent but it's very limited. IIRC this came out in the early 2000s from various NSA whistleblowers who were completely ignored like usual.

jlgreco 13y ago
> IIRC this came out in the early 2000s from various NSA whistleblowers who were completely ignored like usual. Well clearly the concerned just had their tinfoil hats too tight. /s I wonder how long it will be until people start dismissing others as conspiracy theorist nutters for believing that the NSA is doing this shit. Days probably, I'll put money on 'under a week'.
- anigbrowl 13y ago
  Ignored != dismissed. The NSA has been around since 1952 and has briefly come into the spotlight for collecting data on US persons several times. The vast majority of people of people in the US (AFAICT) don't care. It's not that they don't believe such things happen, it's that they're largely indifferent to it. This isn't entirely irrational. After all, we both know that the probability of one of us getting blown up by a terrorist is vanishingly small, right? So although we disapprove of terrorism in general, we don't feel all that threatened by it, personally, and think that people ought to have a sense of perspective about the actual probability rather than focusing on how bad it would be if it happened to us. Likewise, the probability of ending up as the innocent victim of government intelligence probe that ruins one's life is negligible for most people. So small, in fact, that it probably cancels out with the risk from terrorism in the mental calculus of the average American.

jlgreco 13y ago

> IIRC this came out in the early 2000s from various NSA whistleblowers who were completely ignored like usual. Well clearly the concerned just had their tinfoil hats too tight. /s I wonder how long it will be until people start dismissing others as conspiracy theorist nutters for believing that the NSA is doing this shit. Days probably, I'll put money on 'under a week'.

anigbrowl 13y ago
Ignored != dismissed. The NSA has been around since 1952 and has briefly come into the spotlight for collecting data on US persons several times. The vast majority of people of people in the US (AFAICT) don't care. It's not that they don't believe such things happen, it's that they're largely indifferent to it. This isn't entirely irrational. After all, we both know that the probability of one of us getting blown up by a terrorist is vanishingly small, right? So although we disapprove of terrorism in general, we don't feel all that threatened by it, personally, and think that people ought to have a sense of perspective about the actual probability rather than focusing on how bad it would be if it happened to us. Likewise, the probability of ending up as the innocent victim of government intelligence probe that ruins one's life is negligible for most people. So small, in fact, that it probably cancels out with the risk from terrorism in the mental calculus of the average American.