8 ms·

NSA collected US email records in bulk for more than two years under Obama

200 points by k-mcgrady 13y ago

mrt0mat0 13y ago
So Edward Snowden wasn't bluffing when he said there was more... I'm thinking the government is going to try to step up the efforts to bring him (and this will need to include Greenwald) in to stop it all. This is better than tv!
- k-mcgrady 13y ago
  It seems he has a lot info and he's slowly releasing it - probably to ensure the story stays in the news and that there is actual important information to go along with the story of him personally.
- chaz 13y ago
  Snowden isn't mentioned once in this article.
  - gasull 13y ago
    Good. The focus should be on the revelations.
  - mrt0mat0 13y ago
    interesting observation. he wasn't mentioned in the original one either, i believe. This could be a good thing though. more whistleblowers. I have a feeling this is all part of the snowden thing though. just my feeling
samd 13y ago
Every American has to ask themselves, "Is this worth it?" Are the plots stopped and the lives saved worth the loss of privacy, the loss of trust and good will internationally, and most frightening of all, the unprecedented power this gives the government? I don't think anyone can reasonably say that it is.
- k-mcgrady 13y ago
  The scary thing is that citizens don't know how many plots these privacy invasions have stopped and therefore can't have an informed opinion on the matter and can't decide to fight back against these invasions of privacy. I'm sure plenty of plots have been stopped but would they still have been stopped without this information?
  - dwild 13y ago
    The scary thing is that it's possible. Personally I don't care of what they collect because I don't fear the present government. However I fear that any big entities can do the same or that any malicious group could infiltrate the government to get access to these data (or collect more). The fact that we consider our online privacy as granted is the scary part.
    - irishcoffee 13y ago
      > The fact that we consider our online privacy as granted is the scary part. Ignorant, actually. 'Privacy on the internet' is an oxymoron.
    - chockablock 13y ago
      I also fear that the availability of such extensive records on all citizens makes it more likely that an abusive government might come to power. I.e. what Snowden referred to as 'turnkey totalitarianism'.
    - samstave 13y ago
      The only reason you don't fear them is because you don't value your freedom enough.
    - aryastark 13y ago
      There is a fundamental difference between expecting privacy on the Internet, and the government actively collecting all data on all people and compiling a massive database linking all of this data together. No one should expect privacy. There are sketchy ISPs, sketchy mail providers, hosting providers, etc. But a few hackers collecting email from a few individuals is not the same as a massive database that links everything in entire world in one nice package. A few random hackers in Russia do not have the political machinery or military machinery of the US government. They generally don't care that you're pro-gay rights (or whatever). They aren't going to try to punish you for your political views. They probably just want money or to defraud you in someway. The US government, however, wants to control you.
vermontdevil 13y ago
And according to the article they were emails of Americans with no connection to foreigners. The claims of metadata being public and being exempted from Fourth Amendment does not resonate with me and even more so with emails. It seems by collecting IP addresses associated with emails, NSA has the ability to compare that with all the other data they may have collected and build a profile on you. To me it seems to be a violation of the fourth amendment. I do not expect the government to be constantly searching everything about everyone without a probable cause.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
Maascamp 13y ago
"Seeing your IP logs – and especially feeding them through sophisticated analytic tools – is a way of getting inside your head that's in many ways on par with reading your diary," Sanchez added. It's great to see this information going public, however hyperbolic statements like the above are completely unnecessary and really take away from the rest of the article.
- DuskStar 13y ago
  In my opinion, though, that statement is not hyperbolic and is very, very true - no matter how scary that may seem.
lawnchair_larry 13y ago
So at minimum, the NSA literally knows every single person or entity that I have exchanged emails with, when we exchanged emails, the size of the message, every single website I have ever had an account on, for much of my adult life. And that data is sitting in their archives, indefinitely. Just let that sink in for a minute.
- eliasmacpherson 13y ago
  has a nice big graph of all the cc's too.
  - lawnchair_larry 13y ago
    Oh, and I missed it the first read-through: every website I've visited. My life's browsing history. It's almost certain that this metadata was for protocols other than SMTP and HTTP as well. Probably all netflows.
- sc68cal 13y ago
  What I found interesting, was that this so called "contact chaining" (where they graph out who you talk to, and two degrees onward) was only approved after 9/11. Amazing how far we've fallen. The agency "analyzed networks with two degrees of separation (two hops) from the target", the report says. In other words, the NSA studied the online records of people who communicated with people who communicated with targeted individuals. Contact chaining was considered off-limits inside the NSA before 9/11. In the 1990s, according to the draft IG report, the idea was nixed when the Justice Department "told NSA that the proposal fell within one of the Fisa definitions of electronic surveillance and, therefore, was not permissible when applied to metadata associated with presumed US persons".
  - brown9-2 13y ago
    Contact chaining was off limits where some of the contacts were US Persons, I think you mean.
  - rapind 13y ago
thetabyte 13y ago
I find it amusing the the Guardian seems to position this article in such a way that it is meant to disparage the Obama administration. While the administration is far from above criticism, and a variety of other Guardian reveals do justifiably criticize the President, my personal takeaway from this is a sign that the administration did at least attempt to curb some Bush era privacy invasions—though perhaps to a pitiful extent. Funny how the article doesn't seem to put it that way.
- shill 13y ago
  The NSA collected US email records in bulk for more than two years and the FISA court renewed collection orders every 90 days. So the Obama regime didn't curb anything until after the eight or ninth renewal of the program. Pitiful indeed.
  - thetabyte 13y ago
    Are you under the impression that you can review the entire federal government, decide which programs to get rid of, and shut down every one of those programs, during your first year on office? Because if so, please, run, I'd like to see it happen. By pitiful, I meant that this shutdown seems minuscule among the variety of other privacy violations—but that hardly justifies the Guardian using this specific reveal as an attack piece.
    - shill 13y ago
      > Are you under the impression that you can review the entire federal government, decide which programs to get rid of, and shut down every one of those programs, during your first year on office? No, I'm not. But I do believe that we were all given the impression that ending unconstitutional wiretaps was going to be near the top of Obama's to-do list.
      - thetabyte 13y ago
        I agree. That's a problem for which he deserves more than a little criticism. But that's not what I was discussing, at all.
anologwintermut 13y ago
we provide user data to governments only in accordance with the law. Our legal team reviews each and every request, and frequently pushes back when requests are overly broad or don’t follow the correct process. Press reports that suggest that Google is providing open-ended access to our users’ data are false, period. -- Larry Page So, clearly we have a request that is within the law as far the courts are concerned. Did Google push back on this too? Did they succeed? Did the order just not apply to them somehow?
- lawnchair_larry 13y ago
  Although Google's statements are of minimal value to me, my belief is that Google would not have to be complicit in this particular program. This was likely pulling from fiber taps at ISP backbones.
  - 3JPLW 13y ago
    But: such a tap would reveal no information about gmail-to-gmail communication, no? Most gmail usage is via their SSL web app or an email client, and their directions for most (all?) clients specify to use SSL. And in my experience, most people using gmail send most of their emails to other gmail accounts.
gasull 13y ago
How do we know that there isn't another super secretive program, right now, that is still collecting everything? How can we trust the Government, ever in the future, to tell the truth? I don't see how this can actually be solved, since most people aren't concerned about encrypting their communications. I can't use encryption to message other people unless they use encryption too. This is the future. We will be constantly watched. Please tell me I'm wrong.
- zokier 13y ago
  > I don't see how this can actually be solved, since most people aren't concerned about encrypting their communications. They shouldn't need to be. Encryption is cheap, it should happen automatically behind users backs by default. > I can't use encryption to message other people unless they use encryption too. Build the next WhatsApp/Facebook/GMail and integrate encryption to it.
- drivebyacct2 13y ago
  >We will be constantly watched. Your phones are tapped, your metadata is collected, your internet traffic is watched and stored, and your categorized, organized data online (emails, documents, history, behaviors, etc) is available at the drop of a dime. What do you mean "will be constantly watched"?
marze 13y ago
This program has apparently ended. That probably means a more powerful system is operating currently.
breck 13y ago
I created a petition with a concept that I think would be a pretty helpful proactive step to start addressing these problems: https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/enable-american-software-engineers-monitor-nsa-regularly-publishing-general-statistics-its/x6jDvjxk https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/enable-american-so... Let me know what you think!
skwirl 13y ago
Why is the subject of this article Obama? It was a Bush era program that he shut down. But since he didn't do it the day he took office, I guess he is literally Bush Jr. Jr. Great reporting by The Guardian.
- anigbrowl 13y ago
  Easier to gin up outrage, I suppose. Most people here seem to have completely missed the past tense or the subheading 'Secret program launched by Bush continued 'until 2011'', or else chosen to ignore it because they want to vent rather than discuss it.
- marknutter 13y ago
  > But since he didn't do it the day he took office Well... why didn't he?
  - heartbreak 13y ago
    Perhaps because he isn't omniscient and wasn't aware that it existed?
jared314 13y ago
And how, with money polluting politics so badly, do you fight this type of situation? A public scandal. And how do you get a scandal? Wait for the inevitable government overreach and someone to leak it, the bigger the better. There are to many people for it not to leak out, no matter how much you try to squash them. The current situation has been a foregone conclusion for the last decade. This is how the government has worked for years. I'm surprised so many people act shocked by both the government's actions and the leaks.
loumf 13y ago
I really wish the Guardian would get someone very technical to talk to these sources and then write a technical report of exactly what's happening. These dumbed down articles make it hard for me to understand what is happening. The specific question I had is how they jump from email meta-data to IP Logs. If they were collecting all of my IP traffic, that would be a lot bigger deal than email headers. The title and most of the content seem to imply it's only email metadata, so I don't know how to interpret the alarming quotes about having a copy of my brain.

200 points by k-mcgrady 13y ago

So Edward Snowden wasn't bluffing when he said there was more... I'm thinking the government is going to try to step up the efforts to bring him (and this will need to include Greenwald) in to stop it all. This is better than tv!

k-mcgrady 13y ago
It seems he has a lot info and he's slowly releasing it - probably to ensure the story stays in the news and that there is actual important information to go along with the story of him personally.
chaz 13y ago
Snowden isn't mentioned once in this article.
- gasull 13y ago
  Good. The focus should be on the revelations.
- mrt0mat0 13y ago
  interesting observation. he wasn't mentioned in the original one either, i believe. This could be a good thing though. more whistleblowers. I have a feeling this is all part of the snowden thing though. just my feeling

samd 13y ago

Every American has to ask themselves, "Is this worth it?" Are the plots stopped and the lives saved worth the loss of privacy, the loss of trust and good will internationally, and most frightening of all, the unprecedented power this gives the government? I don't think anyone can reasonably say that it is.

k-mcgrady 13y ago
The scary thing is that citizens don't know how many plots these privacy invasions have stopped and therefore can't have an informed opinion on the matter and can't decide to fight back against these invasions of privacy. I'm sure plenty of plots have been stopped but would they still have been stopped without this information?
- dwild 13y ago
  The scary thing is that it's possible. Personally I don't care of what they collect because I don't fear the present government. However I fear that any big entities can do the same or that any malicious group could infiltrate the government to get access to these data (or collect more). The fact that we consider our online privacy as granted is the scary part.
  - irishcoffee 13y ago
    > The fact that we consider our online privacy as granted is the scary part. Ignorant, actually. 'Privacy on the internet' is an oxymoron.
  - chockablock 13y ago
    I also fear that the availability of such extensive records on all citizens makes it more likely that an abusive government might come to power. I.e. what Snowden referred to as 'turnkey totalitarianism'.
  - samstave 13y ago
    The only reason you don't fear them is because you don't value your freedom enough.
  - aryastark 13y ago
    There is a fundamental difference between expecting privacy on the Internet, and the government actively collecting all data on all people and compiling a massive database linking all of this data together. No one should expect privacy. There are sketchy ISPs, sketchy mail providers, hosting providers, etc. But a few hackers collecting email from a few individuals is not the same as a massive database that links everything in entire world in one nice package. A few random hackers in Russia do not have the political machinery or military machinery of the US government. They generally don't care that you're pro-gay rights (or whatever). They aren't going to try to punish you for your political views. They probably just want money or to defraud you in someway. The US government, however, wants to control you.

vermontdevil 13y ago

And according to the article they were emails of Americans with no connection to foreigners. The claims of metadata being public and being exempted from Fourth Amendment does not resonate with me and even more so with emails. It seems by collecting IP addresses associated with emails, NSA has the ability to compare that with all the other data they may have collected and build a profile on you. To me it seems to be a violation of the fourth amendment. I do not expect the government to be constantly searching everything about everyone without a probable cause.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

Maascamp 13y ago

"Seeing your IP logs – and especially feeding them through sophisticated analytic tools – is a way of getting inside your head that's in many ways on par with reading your diary," Sanchez added. It's great to see this information going public, however hyperbolic statements like the above are completely unnecessary and really take away from the rest of the article.

DuskStar 13y ago
In my opinion, though, that statement is not hyperbolic and is very, very true - no matter how scary that may seem.

lawnchair_larry 13y ago

So at minimum, the NSA literally knows every single person or entity that I have exchanged emails with, when we exchanged emails, the size of the message, every single website I have ever had an account on, for much of my adult life. And that data is sitting in their archives, indefinitely. Just let that sink in for a minute.

eliasmacpherson 13y ago
has a nice big graph of all the cc's too.
- lawnchair_larry 13y ago
  Oh, and I missed it the first read-through: every website I've visited. My life's browsing history. It's almost certain that this metadata was for protocols other than SMTP and HTTP as well. Probably all netflows.
sc68cal 13y ago
What I found interesting, was that this so called "contact chaining" (where they graph out who you talk to, and two degrees onward) was only approved after 9/11. Amazing how far we've fallen. The agency "analyzed networks with two degrees of separation (two hops) from the target", the report says. In other words, the NSA studied the online records of people who communicated with people who communicated with targeted individuals. Contact chaining was considered off-limits inside the NSA before 9/11. In the 1990s, according to the draft IG report, the idea was nixed when the Justice Department "told NSA that the proposal fell within one of the Fisa definitions of electronic surveillance and, therefore, was not permissible when applied to metadata associated with presumed US persons".
- brown9-2 13y ago
  Contact chaining was off limits where some of the contacts were US Persons, I think you mean.
- rapind 13y ago

thetabyte 13y ago

I find it amusing the the Guardian seems to position this article in such a way that it is meant to disparage the Obama administration. While the administration is far from above criticism, and a variety of other Guardian reveals do justifiably criticize the President, my personal takeaway from this is a sign that the administration did at least attempt to curb some Bush era privacy invasions—though perhaps to a pitiful extent. Funny how the article doesn't seem to put it that way.

shill 13y ago
The NSA collected US email records in bulk for more than two years and the FISA court renewed collection orders every 90 days. So the Obama regime didn't curb anything until after the eight or ninth renewal of the program. Pitiful indeed.
- thetabyte 13y ago
  Are you under the impression that you can review the entire federal government, decide which programs to get rid of, and shut down every one of those programs, during your first year on office? Because if so, please, run, I'd like to see it happen. By pitiful, I meant that this shutdown seems minuscule among the variety of other privacy violations—but that hardly justifies the Guardian using this specific reveal as an attack piece.
  - shill 13y ago
    > Are you under the impression that you can review the entire federal government, decide which programs to get rid of, and shut down every one of those programs, during your first year on office? No, I'm not. But I do believe that we were all given the impression that ending unconstitutional wiretaps was going to be near the top of Obama's to-do list.
    - thetabyte 13y ago
      I agree. That's a problem for which he deserves more than a little criticism. But that's not what I was discussing, at all.

anologwintermut 13y ago

we provide user data to governments only in accordance with the law. Our legal team reviews each and every request, and frequently pushes back when requests are overly broad or don’t follow the correct process. Press reports that suggest that Google is providing open-ended access to our users’ data are false, period. -- Larry Page So, clearly we have a request that is within the law as far the courts are concerned. Did Google push back on this too? Did they succeed? Did the order just not apply to them somehow?

lawnchair_larry 13y ago
Although Google's statements are of minimal value to me, my belief is that Google would not have to be complicit in this particular program. This was likely pulling from fiber taps at ISP backbones.
- 3JPLW 13y ago
  But: such a tap would reveal no information about gmail-to-gmail communication, no? Most gmail usage is via their SSL web app or an email client, and their directions for most (all?) clients specify to use SSL. And in my experience, most people using gmail send most of their emails to other gmail accounts.

gasull 13y ago

How do we know that there isn't another super secretive program, right now, that is still collecting everything? How can we trust the Government, ever in the future, to tell the truth? I don't see how this can actually be solved, since most people aren't concerned about encrypting their communications. I can't use encryption to message other people unless they use encryption too. This is the future. We will be constantly watched. Please tell me I'm wrong.

zokier 13y ago
> I don't see how this can actually be solved, since most people aren't concerned about encrypting their communications. They shouldn't need to be. Encryption is cheap, it should happen automatically behind users backs by default. > I can't use encryption to message other people unless they use encryption too. Build the next WhatsApp/Facebook/GMail and integrate encryption to it.
drivebyacct2 13y ago
>We will be constantly watched. Your phones are tapped, your metadata is collected, your internet traffic is watched and stored, and your categorized, organized data online (emails, documents, history, behaviors, etc) is available at the drop of a dime. What do you mean "will be constantly watched"?

marze 13y ago

This program has apparently ended. That probably means a more powerful system is operating currently.

breck 13y ago

I created a petition with a concept that I think would be a pretty helpful proactive step to start addressing these problems: https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/enable-american-software-engineers-monitor-nsa-regularly-publishing-general-statistics-its/x6jDvjxk https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/enable-american-so... Let me know what you think!

skwirl 13y ago

Why is the subject of this article Obama? It was a Bush era program that he shut down. But since he didn't do it the day he took office, I guess he is literally Bush Jr. Jr. Great reporting by The Guardian.

anigbrowl 13y ago
Easier to gin up outrage, I suppose. Most people here seem to have completely missed the past tense or the subheading 'Secret program launched by Bush continued 'until 2011'', or else chosen to ignore it because they want to vent rather than discuss it.
marknutter 13y ago
> But since he didn't do it the day he took office Well... why didn't he?
- heartbreak 13y ago
  Perhaps because he isn't omniscient and wasn't aware that it existed?

jared314 13y ago

And how, with money polluting politics so badly, do you fight this type of situation? A public scandal. And how do you get a scandal? Wait for the inevitable government overreach and someone to leak it, the bigger the better. There are to many people for it not to leak out, no matter how much you try to squash them. The current situation has been a foregone conclusion for the last decade. This is how the government has worked for years. I'm surprised so many people act shocked by both the government's actions and the leaks.

loumf 13y ago

I really wish the Guardian would get someone very technical to talk to these sources and then write a technical report of exactly what's happening. These dumbed down articles make it hard for me to understand what is happening. The specific question I had is how they jump from email meta-data to IP Logs. If they were collecting all of my IP traffic, that would be a lot bigger deal than email headers. The title and most of the content seem to imply it's only email metadata, so I don't know how to interpret the alarming quotes about having a copy of my brain.