Wednesday, July 31, 2013

NSA's XKeyscore Allows Analyst Access To 'Nearly Everything A User Does On The Internet'

Read Glenn Greenwald's article on it. Follow the link to the training presentation. Then imagine a bright young analyst at his/her keyboard, with no prior court authorization or only the most generalized authorization, looking for literally anything, looking through your stuff, all of it, even especially if you are American...

2 comments:

  1. No one knows if you are a dog on the 'Net, so how it that software going to decide what is or isn't 'purely domestic' and out of bounds without a rubber-stamped FISA order?

    They got this from Google and are searching their internal data which involves everything conceivable that they can hoover off of the 'Net.

    If they are trying to convince me that no one is checking up on partners, former, current or future, while at work, I have a few real estate deals I'd like to discuss with them.

    It's hard enough to try to control cops from abusing the information that they can access, and they want us to believe that these contractors have 'more moral fiber' - pull the other one, it has bells on...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Bryan, if you ask me "what is privacy," chances are good that I'll point you to another quotation from the Justice who gave us the excellent quotation about democracy and wealth that appears above in my banner, Justice Louis Brandeis. Brandeis, dissenting in Olmstead v. United States, a wiretap case, offered the following:

      The makers of our Constitution undertook to secure conditions favorable to the pursuit of happiness. They recognized the significance of man's spiritual nature, of his feelings and of his intellect. They knew that only part of the pain, pleasure and satisfactions of life are to be found in material things. They sought to protect Americans in their beliefs, their thoughts, their emotions and their sensations. They conferred against the government, the right to be let alone—the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men.

      "[T]he right to be let alone" ... that is what is utterly missing in the approach taken by the NSA and most of its directors I've known anything about. You can say it's their job to look into everything, at home and abroad; I can only reply that such an approach is contrary to all American tradition prior to the past two decades. I don't like it, and I won't pretend I approve of it.

      Delete

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