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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
by 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 agohas a nice big graph of all the cc's too.
- lawnchair_larry 13y agoOh, 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 agoWhat 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".
- sinnerswing 13y agoObama: "but Bin Laden's dead and Al Qaeda has been defeated." No. THEY WON.
- adventured 13y agoMeanwhile, we're about to leave Afghanistan to the Taliban, and we're supplying arms to Al Qaeda loyalists in Syria.
- eightyone 13y agoBill Maher has an excellent clip on this. He boils it down to, "Basically we're arming Al Qaeda." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6paYu3GM2Y http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6paYu3GM2Y
- anigbrowl 13y agoNo they didn't; vrtually none of their objectives have been met, except that of getting the US to remove its military forces from Saudi Arabian soil. I get your point, but it's a purely rhetorical one that has little to do with actual history. Al Qaeda had real objectives of their own, rather than simply existing to make us fearful.
- joelrunyon 13y agoBin Laden's overall strategy against much larger enemies such as the Soviet Union and United States was to lure them into a long war of attrition in Muslim countries, attracting large numbers of jihadists who would never surrender. He believed this would lead to economic collapse of the enemy nations. Al-Qaeda manuals clearly express this strategy. In a 2004 tape broadcast by al-Jazeera, bin Laden spoke of "bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy". [1] [1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osama_bin_Laden#Beliefs_and_ideology http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osama_bin_Laden#Beliefs_and_ide...
- anigbrowl 13y agoThat doesn't really bear out your point.