The NSA has given up on denying things...
 

The NSA has given up trying to deny things... now in statements it just acknowledges programs by name and says they're being used legally.

Today's revelation: everything we do over HTTP is being stored and is easily searchable.

There used to be a time when they denied the existence of things. Now it is statements like:

I think what happened is a bunch of stuff was ordered declassified. So they can't deny it now.

In my opinion the whole federal govt. has made far too many things "classified" that didn't need to be. It was just their way of doing shit that the American people would justifiably question. So make it "classified" and it's a "secret".

The whole thing is out of hand in my opinion. I heard today on the news that a general was complaining that the "sequester" (you know, the reduction in the INCREASE in spending this year) was going to cause the military to "shrink".

GOOD. We spend more than the next nine countries combined already. And we're not even in any "real" war.

They have the American people so isolated and scared of everything...just so the military spending juggenaut can continue.

I personally don't see why there should be any more than a handful of "secrets" by the govt.
They aren't supposed to be doing all this shit and trying to run the world.

They are supposed to work FOR us. But as we all know, that ship sailed decades ago. :(

They are in a war. It's against us.

It makes you wonder how much of this NSA captured data will be used against the American people in the future. Potentially to jail them over things like drugs, small time tax evasion, file sharing, visiting the wrong websites, "suspicious" internet activity, etc.

What scares me is the collection of evidence before a crime is committed.

That and they mention storage issues in 2008... so things were only stored temporarily unless moved to another database by an analyst.

The Utah data center currently under construction will fix that... so who knows how long data will be retained. Plus the data center is designed so they can keep adding and adding and adding onto it.

There is currently a case in Miami where just today the government acknowledged they used these programs. Granted, it is a genuine national security case, but until today they didn't think they needed to disclose what they knew from spying or how they obtained it. As I understand it, the defense will actually know now.

People like Dyna mo and Rochard don't think forward. Like how in the wrong administration your political searches can be used against you.

Or how they likely have dirt on everyone, including the members of the committees tasked with overseeing them.

just the tip of the iceberg ....

lol and you still buy into what they say and go on as if ANYTHING they say is credible.
Unreal.

Mommy!

There was a time when we never discussed the NSA. It was called "no such agency".

There was also a time when you could drive right onto Fort Meade after you told the guard your business. Now you get machine guns in your face.

it took the united states government about fifty years for them to realise just how vunerable they are to terrorist attack.

one of the reasons why there were secrets kept was to protect your people from opposing governments (mostly dictatorships) such as russia and china. if a secret agent was able to steal a secret or buy a secret from a mole, any nationalities secret, they will probably use it against the united states government and maybe endanger the lives of americans at the same time.

I read some where where it's a three step program. If they have someone they want to watch, first step is to look at everyone they talk to, then everyone those people talk to, then everyone those people talk to. This could lead to them going over all the phone calls and emails of over a million people considering social media.

and still many want to see Snowden in jail for letting us know about it...

pfffttt... snowden is a pawn of the american illuminati and the chinese government knew it.

you have no idea what you are talking about here. and i have no idea why you felt the need to not only mention me here, but misrepresent my views.

How to Keep Your Government from Spying on You
Or at least make it more difficult.

Ronald Bailey | June 14, 2013

?Does the [National Security Agency] collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?? Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) asked James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, during a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing in March. Clapper replied, ?No sir...not wittingly.?

We now know that was a bald-faced lie. Or as Clapper nicely parsed it later, it was the ?least untruthful? statement. The NSA has been collecting telephone and telecommunications data from tens of millions of Americans for years now.

The idea is that this data is collected but no federal spook actually looks at it unless additional information?say, a letter from Russia warning about a couple of Chechens living Boston?prompts them to winnow the data seeking connections that might indicate a person is up to no good. But it hasn't worked out that way. Christopher Soghoian, a policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union, likens the situation to having someone tell you that he wants to put a video camera in your bedroom but will not actually look at the stored video unless something bad happens later.

The NSA was able to obtain all that personal information about American citizens because the dominant Internet business model is to exchange free services for personal information that enables targeted advertising. When I interviewed Soghoian, he suggested that the free market has delivered us into a world that is insecure by default. But when I pointed out that Verizon and the other telephone companies are highly regulated semi-monopolies, Soghoian agreed, noting that the phone companies are subject to more regulation that Internet companies like Google or Facebook. That gives the government more opportunities for punishing them should they be recalcitrant when it comes to government demands. Soghoian added that the telephone industry has been practicing surveillance for 100 years already.

Seeking information on the nuts and bolts of technical steps that citizens might take to shield themselves from electronic snooping by the government, I talked with Mark Wuergler, a senior security researcher at the cybersecurity firm Immunity, Inc. ?I have bad news for the average citizen,? Wuergler told me: In order to avoid monitoring by the government, citizens need to have control over their own hardware, networks, and servers and use encryption ubiquitously. He?s pretty certain that currently available methods for trying to maintain data privacy and security are so clunky and complicated that most Americans will simply not bother trying to use them. ?It boils down to less convenient more secure; more convenient less secure,? Wuergler said. ?You just need to assume that your data is being watched.?

Assuming that your data is being watched, what might you do to hide it?

First, consider not putting so much stuff out there in the first place. Wuergler devised a program he calls Stalker that can siphon off nearly all of your digital information to put together an amazingly complete portrait of your life and pretty much find out where you are at all times. Use Facebook if you must, but realize you?re making it easy for the government to track and find you when they choose to do so.

A second step toward increased privacy is to use a browser search engine like DuckDuckGo, which does not collect the sort of information?say, your IP address?that can identify you with your Internet searches. Thus, if the government bangs on their doors to find out what you?ve been up to, DuckDuckGo has nothing to hand over. I have decided to make DuckDuckGo my default for general browsing searching, turning to Google only for items such as breaking news and scholarly articles. (Presumably, the NSA would be able to tap into my searches on DuckDuckGo in real time.)

Third, TOR offers free software and a network of relays that can shield your location from prying eyes. TOR operates by bouncing your emails and files around the Internet through encrypted relays. Anyone intercepting your message once it exits a TOR relay cannot trace it back to your computer and your physical location. TOR is used by dissidents and journalists around the world. On the downside, in my experience it operates more slowly than, say, Google.

Fourth, there is encryption. An intriguing one-stop encryption solution is Silent Circle. Developed by Phil Zimmermann, the inventor of the Pretty Good Privacy encryption system, Silent Circle enables users to encrypt their text messages, video, and phone calls, as well as their emails. Zimmermann and his colleagues claim that they, or anyone else, cannot decrypt our messages across their network, period. As Wuergler warned, this security doesn?t come free. Silent Circle charges $10 per month for its encryption services.

You might consider encrypting the data stored on your computer using the free encryption software offered by TrueCrypt. If you keep data in the cloud, you might use SpiderOak, which bills itself as a ?zero-knowledge? company. That means it does not have any way to decrypt the data you store with it. However, SpiderOak will provide personally identifiable information about users to law enforcement if required to do so by law. The company offers two gigabytes of free storage for beginners.

With regard to encrypting data, you should keep in mind a recent case, United States v. Fricosu. Ramona Fricosu was accused of mortgage fraud. Asserting Fifth Amendment protections against self-incrimination, Fricosu refused to provide prosecutors with the password to her encrypted computer. A federal judge ordered her to provide the password or supply a decrypted hard drive to the police. She claimed to have forgotten the password, but her husband offered the police some plausible possibilities, one of which worked.

Now for some bad news. Telephone metadata of the sort the NSA acquired from Verizon is hard?read: impossible?to hide. As the ACLU?s Soghoian notes, you can?t violate the laws of physics: In order to connect your mobile phone, the phone company necessarily needs to know where you are located. Of course, you can avoid being tracked through your cell phone by removing its batteries (unless you have an iPhone), but once you slot it back in, there you are.

For lots more information on how to you might be able to baffle government monitoring agencies, check out the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Surveillance Self-Defense Web pages.

Wuergler is sanguine about NSA snooping. ?To me personally, I think it?s an acceptable risk,? he told me. ?I believe that it?s not being used on a mass basis against American citizens. At least I hope not.? I hope not, too. But in the meantime, I want to rely on something more than hope when it comes to reining in government power.





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