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> The mental leap here is subtle, but substantial. Since I have been told I can't use US selectors , I assume the system enforces this. As such, US citizens hav
by rl3 13y ago
> The mental leap here is subtle, but substantial. Since I have been told I can't use US selectors , I assume the system enforces this. As such, US citizens have nothing to worry about.
I think it's fair to say most rank and file NSA employees are honest and actually do believe in their mission. The far scarier thought is how things may work at an extremely senior level (contractors included), where there's literally nobody there to watch the watchers, or at least challenge them without being fired and blackballed.
That said, "US selectors" shouldn't return the results that they do in the first place. Obviously there's incidental collection, which is unavoidable. But the notion of incidental collection, as with metadata collection, was hijacked and used in public relations messaging as a cover for actual domestic collection programs that intentionally capture the full contents of nearly all domestic communications within the United States.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/government_programs/july-dec13/whistleblowers_08-01.html http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/government_programs/july-dec1...
Despite exceptions such as the article above, this messaging has largely been successful. Even The Guardian and The Washington Post---organizations who publish stories directly sourced from documents leaked by Snowden---routinely fail to underscore the critical difference between actual collection, and "collection" in the sense of mere authorized access to data that's already intercepted and stored. The two have been intentionally conflated as part of a semantics game, and it's working beautifully to mislead the American public about what's actually happening.
- secthrowaway 13y ago> That said, "US selectors" shouldn't return the results that they do in the first place. Determining if a "selector" is tied to a U.S. person is actually a very subtle and very hard problem. Let's take a phone number +1 (212) 555-1234 Is this a US selector? It's a selector for a phone in the US, but that's not the same thing as a phone number tied to a US citizen. Let's say I'm following a senior North African pirate with a Maltese mobile +356 2010-1234 and he calls/is called by my number above? - Should I follow it? Or is it absolutely off limits for me because it happens to be a U.S. number? - How do I determine if it's tied to a U.S. person? - What if it's a shared number between a group of associates, all of whom are not U.S. persons except for one? - Is that number off limits now? - If it is a U.S. person what should I do with it? - Pretend it doesn't exist? Turn it over to U.S. Federal law enforcement? Who should I turn it over to? DEA? FBI? ATF? DHS? The Coast Guard? U.S. Customs and Border Patrol? It's actually a significant intelligence task to figure this out.
- rl3 13y agoI agree completely. However, my statement was not intended to be read in isolation, but in context of "domestic collection programs that intentionally capture the full contents of nearly all domestic communications within the United States." I was referring to the bulk interception and subsequent long-term retention of data on US persons. The implication of my statement was: assuming this type of collection didn't exist, selectors related to potential US persons (for whatever reason) would simply return intercept data beginning from the time said selector was invoked. Contrast that to the present, where selectors are capable of retroactively returning the sum total of a US person's digital (and by some extension physical) life for the past 5+ years. It's commendable that the procedures for accessing the data of potential US persons are so stringent, but at the end of the day there is still an incredibly intimate and detailed picture of almost every single US citizen's private life being retained on a long-term basis.