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"The court, whose rulings are normally kept secret, said the NSA may have violated US law for collecting as many as 56,000 emails on an annual basis between 200

by amirmc 13y ago

"The court, whose rulings are normally kept secret, said the NSA may have violated US law for collecting as many as 56,000 emails on an annual basis between 2008 and 2011. But intelligence officials speaking to reporters anonymously say the scooping of emails was unintentional, blaming it on a technological problem." Aside from the whole mass-spying thing, that it took years to uncover and deal with such a major (& illegal) problem doesn't say much for their technical prowess. How much stuff is going wrong right now that they haven't found yet?

spullara 13y ago
You mean like Google collecting all the Wifi packets they saw with their street view vehicles? http://www.bit-tech.net/news/bits/2010/05/17/google-admits-street-view-wifi-sniffing/1 http://www.bit-tech.net/news/bits/2010/05/17/google-admits-s... I'm not really defending it but it does seem like big, smart, technical organizations make blindingly bad mistakes.
- frank_boyd 13y ago
  That was not a mistake. Things like these need features that need to be developed and budgets that need to be approved. Somebody did that. But that's for another discussion.
  - spullara 13y ago
    I'm don't think you work for a company that develops software at scale. An individual did that, yes, but did Google as an organization decide to do it explicitly? Probably not.
trevelyan 13y ago
What struck me reading this passage is that the NSA defines "collect" as manually searching for materials that have already been stored in a massive database. If we read the report in this light, it suggests that either the FISA court has explicitly ruled that such mass storage is illegal and the NSA is thus engaged in willful violation of its judicial oversight, OR "collect" really means "search" and this is evidence of mass deceit of Congress and the American people by James Clapper and other NSA officials who have testified to the contrary before Congress.

by amirmc 13y ago

spullara 13y ago

You mean like Google collecting all the Wifi packets they saw with their street view vehicles? http://www.bit-tech.net/news/bits/2010/05/17/google-admits-street-view-wifi-sniffing/1 http://www.bit-tech.net/news/bits/2010/05/17/google-admits-s... I'm not really defending it but it does seem like big, smart, technical organizations make blindingly bad mistakes.

frank_boyd 13y ago
That was not a mistake. Things like these need features that need to be developed and budgets that need to be approved. Somebody did that. But that's for another discussion.
- spullara 13y ago
  I'm don't think you work for a company that develops software at scale. An individual did that, yes, but did Google as an organization decide to do it explicitly? Probably not.

trevelyan 13y ago

What struck me reading this passage is that the NSA defines "collect" as manually searching for materials that have already been stored in a massive database. If we read the report in this light, it suggests that either the FISA court has explicitly ruled that such mass storage is illegal and the NSA is thus engaged in willful violation of its judicial oversight, OR "collect" really means "search" and this is evidence of mass deceit of Congress and the American people by James Clapper and other NSA officials who have testified to the contrary before Congress.