Topic: NSA Recommends Dropping Phone Surveillance Program (Read 275 times)

They are not cautious they have a law, where they can't spy on US citizens without a court order, but foreigners are free game... That's fine and dandy from the legal standpoint, but not from the IT point. You either record all and turn a blind eye or only record arbitrarily chosen suspects and hope you don't miss the dangerous from the vast majority unchecked.

But even if you record them all, finding the suspicious ones fast enough, sorting thru that massive amount of information, while avoiding false positives, well lets just say its challenging. This is in the realm of data mining and AI... And in case of phone calls there is also voice recognition.

Ok my point of view on this topic is that I don't think the American public are the only ones suffering from this problem of privacy, I don't have concrete facts to back this up, but I strongly believe that if the USA as cautious as they are about issues regarding privacy can still be contending with the issue, how much more the other parts of the world I'm talking, developing countries. I think the primary focus should be the general safety of the human race or populace.

People have many more dimensions than who was one past employer.

Cryptography becoming something half-way understood by the average of the more skilled computer users is a relatively new thing, after all.

Also, it may be of interest. Although the past several years has implicated those persons heading the CIA and the FBI in attempting to bring down the Trump presidency, we have not seen any such thing with the NSA. You have the Snowden disclosures, true.

But not outright political corruption.

Yes and no, they do their own data gathering, AND also sub contract 3rd parties such as Google and Facebook. Under US law, they just can't refuse the NSA; they may gag order them if need to, but they can at least profit from it... If a company is American, the NSA can come knocking their door for a contract they just cannot refuse or even disclose to anyone.

I think they have vast data centers located in Utah and other places. Their operation must be massive, even bigger than Google's. Which brings other interesting problems with the analysis and classification of such enormous amount of data, fast enough to be of any use... Also the best American cryptographers use to work there, many might probably be here just not telling you anything (and they can't anyway).

Would you be surprised if you learned that Satoshi actually worked for the NSA? I know i wouldn't. It doesn't mean anything, except more brilliant people working there. The NSA has directly contributed to the open source community before, in the form of SELinux. Of course more recently they tried submitting a flawed crypto algorithm to the Linux kernel, which was initially accepted and then dropped once the community found it was flawed and essentially backdoored.

In code we trust. That's why we like Bitcoin

So the NSA subcontract it to FacebooK?

The government for sure is watching us and analyzing our metadata. Maybe not every bit of detail but I do believe this came out at the height of the data protection controversy so I am not so sure how much I believe it

Pfft, as if they can't find ways to continue doing it or to outsource it to allies or private companies. The future of governments is Chinese-level surveillance. That's how governments do, stick their noses in where they shouldn't.


Many times they don't even need special permissions. You'd be surprised of the amount of info people share online for the public. Just use AI to compile those.

It's pretty hard for me to distinguish sarcasm and just naive people on the internet , still with the knowledge of your intention unfortunately not even a smirk

Oh it does work all right, but compliance with US laws is unrealistic at best. Look at it from the technical point of view, how are you going to filter out calls from Americans? all you can do is perhaps look the other way or start a complicated unscalable filtering process.

The NSA has no choice but to record it all, and when the other agencies request the data they better check first they won't be using information that was not supposed to be recorded in the first place...

You cannot black/white list people, because if a call from a foreigner occurs, its valid (at least a half of it) to record it. You also cannot do it by location, because the foreigner might be already in the US territory, and the American abroad.

I doubt the surveillance will really stop, it might just become more undercover, as originally intended. They have to record all, then try to classify that mess. I bet they have some alliance with the world's largest data mining company, Google. I wouldn't be surprised they are using AI to sort all that info out before it becomes useless.

How ironic when US is actually being called as the land of the free. The government should always and will always have no rights to get all the information that an individual have.

We should support those organizations that will be against this rather than those who support this.

Without a bit of humor bitcointalk would be boring. Look, we have Marxists here afraid for the value of their crypto... Come on! Comedy gold right here!

 

I can't read the full article it's asking me to subscribe to the WSJ, but i don't trust those organisations at all , why would anybody believe a single word from them after the snowden leaks?

 
That's just a meme and not real....
And even if it was real what would having humour help with surveilling millions of innocent people???

From what I understand the NSA!=CIA. The CIA has a sense of humor...

No, you are not being a tad playful. Neither am I. This is the NSA, this is what they do, and how they do it. They are playing nothing but games. I think for the most part they likely have a beneficial influence, and I'm okay with it. Not saying there are not or have not been abuses.

This sort of thing will help me sleep at night, right?

But yeah, I know what you're saying and everything, I fully get it. Just being a tad playful.

Yeah...let's all agree that's what's really happening...

Eh. That's a theory that you could run with. Maybe it's just that they actually don't think the program is worth all of the effort because in 2015 there was a major change in legislation which forced them to be more compliant.


This is true though, they're still going to be having the other nations in the world spying on us because that fits within current legislation. It is without a doubt a overreach of government, though there's nothing we can do about it.

Why even broadcast this news to the whole world? The transatlantic cables are still monitored. The solution is simple: if it is illegal in the US just outsource the job to one of the other 5 ಠ_ಠ...

So....

Translating....

When they said they had the program, it wasn't really working, but now that they say they don't need it and it's working properly, it's working perfectly?

NSA is going to be recommending the ending of a program that collects information (such as metadata) regarding your phone calls and texts (if you live in the US) They're going to be doing this as they cite that the program is a logistical nightmare to attempt to control, as new laws have been passed by lawmakers to ensure proper privacy compliance

They're saying that for the amount of legal compliance necessary to continue the program, it will just be better to shut it down.

I personally don't know if this is just a publicity stunt, and the government is just going to continue spying on the American people. Though I do hope this isn't such, and that these programs slowly come to an end as people notice that they really don't do more than invade the lives of innocent Americans.

Article - https://www.wsj.com/articles/nsa-recommends-dropping-phone-surveillance-program-11556138247