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>Any kind of Internet traffic that passes before these mass surveillance sensors can be analyzed in a protocol-agnostic manner, meta-data and content both, and
by pvnick 13y ago
>Any kind of Internet traffic that passes before these mass surveillance sensors can be analyzed in a protocol-agnostic manner, meta-data and content both, and it can be today, right now, searched not only with very little effort, via a complex regular expression — which is a type of shorthand programming — but also via any algorithm an analyst can implement in popular high level programming
That's amazing. Imagine being able to construct a regular expression that get's applied on every single piece of communication in the world. Yes, it's far too much power to entrust to anyone, much less an unaccountable secretive organization, but I'll be damned if that's not an incredibly fascinating and attractive proposition. No wonder these bureaucrats are willing to so thoroughly overstep the law, that kind of power must be very tempting.
- MrZongle2 13y agoThe movie "Sneakers" keeps coming to mind. "Too many secrets" indeed.
- id 13y agoYes, power can be amazing. But this is also very scary, especially because we know it has already been used repeatedly in a harmful way.
- coldtea 13y agoScary if you are on the receiving end, like most people. But they are on the power end.
- rosser 13y ago...and apparently oblivious to the possibility that they might ever be on the "wrong" end of it.
- enraged_camel 13y agoThis is a foolish belief. The higher ups in NSA are most likely under the very same surveillance that they oversee, whether they know it or not. After all, the NSA cannot be immune to internal politics and power-plays.
- coldtea 13y agoUsually there's a "code of silence" between crooks such as these. They know that if they started digging for another, they'd have others dig for their shit. Plus, it's not like anyone will use their information to make their life hell or put them in jail. At worst, they might be denied some promotion.
- swalsh 13y agoThere would actually be some really great opportunity for academic research in that data set too.
- eli 13y agoNo doubt, but how would you get it approved by the university ethics board?
- smokeyj 13y agoEvery comment, every upvote, every webpage you've ever viewed - parsed and mined for context specific metadata by some watson-like super-brain. And the interface isn't a regex, it's more minority-report style and lets you query people by political/economic/religious/etc affiliation. And you better believe there's a terminate button that disables your car brakes courtesy of on-star. (I keed I keed)
- lukifer 13y ago"In the case of Michael Hastings, what evidence is available publicly is consistent with a car cyber attack. And the problem with that is you can't prove it." - Richard Clark, former Counter-Terrorism Czar While evidence is insufficient to draw conclusions in that specific case, the fact that it is so plausible should be extremely worrying. (Hi, NSA spiders.)
- roasty 13y agoEvery single communication? That would be impressive, if it were possible.
- timdiggerm 13y agoCan you imagine a way of constructing things such that, whether or not the NSA does this, no one could do that?