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I was struck by this part: "FEINSTEIN: [...] upstream collection [...] comprises about 10 percent of all collection that takes place under 702, and occurs when

I was struck by this part: "FEINSTEIN: [...] upstream collection [...] comprises about 10 percent of all collection that takes place under 702, and occurs when NSA obtains Internet communications, such as e-mails, from certain U.S. companies that operate the Internet [backbone]" If vacuuming the internet backbone is only 10% of the data they collect, where the hell do they find enough data to fill the remaining 90%? Phone calls/SMS? Banks/payments? Encryption they can't break, so they have to ask the endpoint, like Lavabit?

pyre 13y ago
It's possible that this is a misunderstanding of terms. It seems reasonable that when the NSA pulls up all data on a single person only 10% of it comes from the Internet firehose, and the other 90% comes from Facebook/Google/etc. They may be sucking up all of the Internet, but are not able to correlate is to a person 100% of the time in an automated fashion.