- Previously, the N.S.A. filtered information before sharing intercepted communications with another agency, like the C.I.A. or the intelligence branches of the F.B.I. and the Drug Enforcement Administration. The N.S.A.’s analysts passed on only information they deemed pertinent, screening out the identities of innocent people and irrelevant personal information.
Now, other intelligence agencies will be able to search directly through raw repositories of communications intercepted by the N.S.A. and then apply such rules for “minimizing” privacy intrusions.
Realistically speaking: The NSA hasn't been filtering shit since 2003 at least. And let's break down those sixteen agencies: Air Force Intelligence - Has no domestic charter, has no domestic interest Army Intelligence - Has no domestic charter, has no domestic interest Central Intelligence Agency - already had it, since 2003 (or 1947 in most cases) Coast Guard Intelligence - be serious. Defense Intelligence Agency - Has no domestic charter, already had everything the NSA had Department of Energy - exactly the people you'd like to have unfiltered access to NSA data Department of Homeland Security - already the umbrella organization of the NSA, still hasn't rolled back the porno scanners Department of State - Can't do shit without any of the other three letter agencies on the ground Department of the Treasury - Secret Service, busts counterfeiters Drug Enforcement Administration - already had it (DEA is a pseudo soft power wing of the CIA, just ask Pablo Escobar or Manuel Noriega) Federal Bureau of Investigation - already had it, still couldn't stop the Tsarnievs even when the FSB said "these guys have been hanging out at Chechen terrorist training camps", couldn't stop Esteban Santiago even when he walked into the VA hospital saying "I hear voices and want to do violence" Marine Corps Intelligence - Has no domestic charter, has no domestic interest National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency - literally, map makers National Reconnaissance Office - literally, instrument supervisors National Security Agency - the agency in question Navy Intelligence - has no domestic charter, has no domestic interest So really, this comes down to "now the FBI and DEA can rifle through NSA data without the NSA approving it first." But the FBI and DEA have been doing it already for years. So really, this is an article saying "you know those parallel construction prosecutions you knew would never happen? Yeah, they're never going to happen."
I'd assume this is move is also to unload the NSA from what's been known as too much data with too little people on top of what's already been posted here: If its how you've broken it down, then I don't understand the hype if its just distributing the load. Also, this could well be knit-picking, but Coast Guard would probably fall under counter drug trafficking.
In my opinion? The NSA collects way too much shit. They've blown through their charter long since, and when foreign governments bitch about how the NSA is distributing industrial espionage to American companies in the name of "security" they've got a legitimate beef. The NSA spies on too many people with too few safety measures with no respect for the constitution, privacy, or common decency. but What they've legitimately collected should be available, per reasonable checks and balances, to the rest of the security community. The whole purpose of interagency cooperation is to streamline and make efficient the valiant goal of national security and safety. Pragmatically speaking, too many people are being spied on by the NSA. Pragmatically speaking, this change means that too many people spied on by the NSA can be spied on by everyone else on A-space. Pragmatically speaking, it's offensive. But pragmatically speaking nobody under discussion gives a fuck. They never have. Principally speaking, the thing to do is work harder to limit the haul the NSA gets to take. But pragmatically speaking, that ain't never gonna happen until we get a right to privacy amendment or something.
I've kind of always wondered and assumed, the NSA and whoever else knows how to work around stuff like what's linked below, right? Large sample sizes produce some difficulties in analysis, and we're definitely dealing with large sample sizes here. http://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/125750/sample-size-too-large
I II III the most common complaint about the NSA is that they collect more than they can ever possibly analyze. Based on their charter, they're doing it exactly wrong. But they're not doing it based on their charter. HOW IT'S SUPPOSED TO WORK Igor Isis intends to blow up New York with a surplus Soviet warhead. He texts this to Jerry Jihad on O2 and the NSA siphons up literally everything on O2. Semantic Forest picks up the keywords "Warhead" "New York" and "blow up" and triggers an alarm. Then a human reads the conversation, sets Igor Isis and Jerry Jihad to surveillance, and everything they say is monitored by Jack Bauer and Ethan Hunt. Just as they're about to pick up the warhead, Delta Force swoops in and saves America thanks to those marvelous whiz kids at the NSA. HOW IT ACTUALLY WORKS The NSA siphons up every single data packet O2 has crossing their networks. There is no possible way any computer or human or combination can possibly parse any of it in realtime so Jerry and Igor's conversation goes unnoticed. Three months later, with millions dead and Manhattan a radioactive hole, the FBI finds Igor Isis' Facebook page and notices that he claimed he was going to blow up Manhattan. The FBI subpoenas his phone number and gets his records. They appeal to the NSA to give them everything they have on Igor and Jerry, and the NSA literally has everything. Then the NSA uses voiceprints and IPs and shit to find their way bak to Igor and Jerry's numbers on O2 and leafs back through their records to find the conversation about how they were going to blow up New York. They show this to the FBI, who then grabs the data on everyone they ever talked to. Several dozen people are swept up into CIA black sites, Guantanamo grows, and millions of people are still dead. But the NSA gets to point out that their surveillance was successful. This whole kerfuffle is over the fact that the FBI no longer needs to ask "mother may I" to see the phone records of dead, successful Jihadis. They can run their own search. theoretically the FBI might find something that might save lives or some shit but let's be real: Igor Isis could post a fuckin' Youtube video of himself with an ISIS flag and an AK and a fuckin' warhead in the background and the world wouldn't know about it until it was too late. Your link isn't about intelligence gathering. It's about statistics. Statistically, 6% of terrorists are Islamic. but you don't need to find six percent. You need to find Dzhokar Tsarniev. The NSA's approach will tell you everything you've ever wanted to know about Dzhokar Tsarniev after he's blown up the Boston Marathon, not before.
Ah, maybe my line of thinking is completely incorrect then. Which would be: To find Dzhokar Tsarniev, to find whoever your person of interest is, there has to be a profile, right? (Maybe this is where I'm wrong?). The profile would come from the absurd amount of data being collected from everything, and then parsed into various keywords, time entries, etc. that all create a generic "Dzhokar" or "Timothy McVeigh". For that to be useful or correct enough to work, bias has to be avoided, and everything else outlined in that statistics reading would come into play, otherwise you'll never be any closer to finding something/someone useful.
I am almost positive this has come up before, and I'm equally confident bfv had something useful and insightful to say. Lemme take a crack at it. What is your profile of Dzhokar Tsarniev? Immigrant, loner, angry, access to weapons, says nasty shit about the US to his friends on the phone, has traveled abroad, possibly to scary places? On the one hand, that covers waaaaay too many people to make it useful. On the other hand, if you decide to push everybody that might be in that pocket, you're likely to radicalize more than a few of them, alienate the rest, and show your hand to anybody you might actually be after. I mean, the CIA is adamant that they didn't radicalize Anwar al-Awlaki. But they totally radicalized Anwar al-Awlaki. Assume one person in a hundred actually intends to do violence. Push a hundred of them. How many intend to do violence now? And this is the NSA we're talking about - they don't push. They have no boots-on-ground. They have wiretaps. So back it out the other way. List your favorite 30 terrorists and build a profile that matches all of them. What you discover is that (A) if you build it wide enough to include all of them you've included much too large a sample size (B) if you take your sample size down to something reasonable you've excluded a lot of your hits (C) (and C is the real problem) what makes them terrorists generally isn't the shit they say on the phone. I mean, look. That's a credible threat, method, means and opportunity, from a former Army marksman against a high-profile target. It's also a stand-up comic paraphrasing Fight Club on Facebook. The NYPD took it seriously. The NSA can't because the amount of people suggesting violence in private conversations is orders and orders of magnitude more than the amount of people saying shit in public. It's a real problem: the FBI investigated Omar Mateen for ten fucking months. That's real human beings following a suspect around in unmarked cars'n'shit for longer than a school year and determining the dude wasn't a threat. You're going to pick this guy out via his text messages? It makes more sense when you realize what the NSA is designed for: spying on zaibatsus and nation-states. Your "find me a terrorist" profile goes to shit but your "find me all communications out of Sary-Shagan related to lasers" or "find me every Siemens contractor that has ever mentioned semiconductors" is super easy. Not only that you can run all of those intercepts together and find commonality. You can get common trends and fill in the blanks. You can do all that old-school Cold War intelligence-gathering goodness that built the whole artifice in the first place. The link I'm looking for explains how taking a large statistical analysis and backing it out to individual people will never work because the stochastic variation of individuals thwarts any attempt at statistical profiling. However, a large statistical analysis is exactly what you need to determine the size and shape of a nuclear missile program, or clandestine troop movements, or a KGB black site, or a new Samsung semiconductor. And while the first, second and third examples have dropped in priority since the fall of the Iron Curtain, the fourth example is going strong.Joe Lipari might walk into an Apple store on Fifth Avenue with an Armalite AR-10 gas powered semi-automatic weapon and pump round after round into one of those smug, fruity little concierges.
Trump will be the best thing to happen to Obama's legacy. After the shitshow I expect, Obama will look like Lincoln or FDR in comparison.
Already is - hence "Obama was so wonderful" from the left and somewhat center. History will be the real arbitrator on his legacy. That's not to say the swinging of the political pendulum will have something to say about this transition and next silly season.
Really. I'll play. Kennedy - LBJ - Nixon - Ford - Carter - Reagan - Bush - Clinton - Bush II - Obama That gives you over 50 years to play with. I'm curious to hear an objective argument as to why the guy on the end is "one of the worst presidents" considering the guys in the middle.
I keep trying to put out a decent response but Portland is snowed in and the shop is busy. I'll be brief. There are no triumphs in foreign policy and many dissatisfaction. We still have troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and now have troops in a few new countries. The Arab spring made nothing better. Pivot to Asia doesn't seem to have even happened. Rapprochement with Russia, well...lolz. Israel is...a fucking mess, we really couldn't be getting along with them worse. Relations with Cuba is a nice thing but pretty underwhelming. There have been some improvements in relations with regional economic and governance groups around the world. He killed Osama! Health care costs jumped more this year than they have in decades. Health care is supposed to be Obama's big thing. Personally I don't feel like the health care reform was done well, it might mostly be because I've paid more for less care every year since it's been passed and I lack any objectivity about all the good it's done. I'm paying significantly more for significantly less care as are most other people I know. He 'saved the economy.' I think most presidents would have done about the same thing he did. Lots of people lost their homes but the 1% did pretty well as he bailed out the banks. Some decent work on the environment and workers rights. Don't call it a legacy because much of it will be gutted in the next two years. Gays can openly serve in the military and LGBT rights have been advanced, that's cool but not really big impact stuff that wasn't coming down the pipes in the next decade Obama or not. The main reason I think he should live in infamy. Government has become opaque and the citizens transparent. Bush got things started but the Obama administration really ran with it. Massive surveillance technology has been brought to bear against citizens while Freedom of Information requests are being denied at a record rate. NSL letters, prosecution of whistle blowers, Sneak and Peek warrants, suspicionless stops of American citizens at internal US checkpoints by the boarder patrol, prosecutions that are based on the fruit of knowledge obtained by technology's like stingrays where the defendant never gets to challenge the initial search or even know that it existed (who knows what else they are using). I could go on but this is a fair collection of the things his administration has been up to that trouble me. The people get to see less and less of how the sausage is made while they have lost most of the protections that used to be assumed to be protected under the 4th amendment against getting ground up by government. I think that the relationship between government and the governed has been profoundly changed and there will be terrible consequences down the line when the new powers and protections available to government fall into the wrong hands. I think people we will look back and say that this was the time things really went off the tracks. Bush II was the inflection point in relationship and Obama was the guy who pushed things over the edge needlessly. I could be getting crazy. I sound a lot like people I've known who were survailed and assailed by the FBI in the 60's. They sounded a little crazy to me until I heard some of the dirty tricks that the government put on them. There are people I love and respect who think I'm a little wacky but I still think that our society is in deep trouble and that Obama has done things that are undermining our basic constitutional protections and enhancing government power by degrading constitutional freedoms and the liberal democracy. On an up note I just found out that a coffee shop three blocks from me is closing down. Huzzah! The opened after me and there is plenty of space to put a coffee shop without being that close to another one in this part of town. It was kind of a dick move. Their coffee wasn't as good as mine but they had some nice pastries that they made on site. I think what killed them was not being open 7 days a week and changing their hours too much. If they had been open seven days a week and had better brewing equipment they probably wouldn't have closed up shop. I don't know that I'll see a lot of business from them closing but I'll see a bit. They were very new Portland with natural wood edge counters and shiny and slick, my old building shop has a lot of character. I'm sure they played a lot of very comfortable music, I play all kinds of weird shit that is delightful if you don't want the standard Portland playlist. It's a lifestyle guig. I'm very old Portland... WTE, things might get better but they aren't going to change. I'd rather jump off a bridge than look at a natural edge counter all cut from the same tree for the rest of my days. Huzzah! Huzzah! I've outlasted the competition! I'm busier this winter than last! Huzzah! Seriously I just found out about this and want to crow but don't want to come off as a dick to my customers so this is my outlet.
I appreciate the thoughtful response. Thank you. Above all else, congrats on outlasting your competition. I can imagine how that feels. So the real question is whether you feel like making some nice pastries on site? That said: - Barack Obama Your complaints basically boil down to "Obama didn't stem the tide" or "Trump is going to destroy everything he did. In some cases you're complaining that he didn't do enough and he did too much at the same time. Line by line: - Troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Bush II overthrew the secular power center of the Middle East and Reagan created the Taliban. You're mad that Obama didn't solve a problem 30 years in the making? And then you're upset that we didn't get any regime change out of the Arab Spring. The last time the US got involved in something like that we ended up with Mossadeq under house arrest and a talentless despot on a puppet throne. Israel? Israel is being run by the guy who incited a crazy man to shoot Rabin. You're putting that on Obama? - Health care costs. Aren't going down. But find the inflection point: The fact that 20 million people have health insurance that didn't should count for something. Yeah - the Republicans are likely to tear it apart but I mean, Reagan stopped stem cell research for 8 years. Bush II piled millions into the Office of Faith-based Initiatives. Nixon created HMOs which got us here in the first place. Infamy? - "Saved" the economy. "Most presidents would have done the same thing." - "Bush got things started but the Obama administration really ran with it." In this case, "really ran with it" means "didn't immediately reverse the September 11 police state." You're griping about Stingrays which are state-level, not federal level. You're griping about the border patrol and lemme tell ya - both the north and south borders are hella chiller under Obama than they were under Bush. You've got a lot of nebulous examples of things that are bad - and they're bad. Don't get me wrong. But the "oh shit you're idiots" moment for the Obama administration was Holder's Fast & Furious in which 1300 street-legal guns disappeared into the cartels. Let's get real: - Bush: $12bln in unmarked cash pallets vanishing into Iraq. Which only happened because, well, we invaded Iraq. Which only happened because, well, September 11. - Clinton: 76 dead cult members in Waco. Plus Ruby Ridge. Plus Oklahoma City Bombing. Plus the first WTO bomb. - Bush I: Desert Shield. Desert Storm. Somalia. Panama. - Reagan: El Salvador. Lebanon bombings. Grenada. Iran Contra. - Carter: Iran Hostage Crisis. - Ford: Pardoning Nixon. - Nixon: Doing shit he needed pardoning for. - LBJ: Winding up the Vietnam War. - Kennedy: Getting us into the Vietnam War. Bay of Pigs. Cuban Missile Crisis. I mean... Obama doesn't so much as have an Elian Gonzalez to explain. ________________________________________________________ I get it. He's no knight in shining armor. I get it. People far less cynical than myself expected unicorns and rainbows out of this administration. I get it. Fuckin' Guantanamo Bay is still open. But we're talking about a Kenyan-born secret muslim that half the country loses their shit over because he's black and a Republican congress that decided "fuck you, you've got slightly less than a year left in office, we're not going to vote on a single Supreme Court nominee." Even FDR wasn't cool with that shit. There's a whole lot I would have liked to have been different about 2008-2016. But holy fuck, dude, compared to where we've been? ..."one of the worst presidents of modern times" is a titch hyperbolic, no?...the federal government is an aircraft carrier, it’s not a speedboat. And, if you need any evidence of that, think about how hard we worked over the last eight years with a very clear progressive agenda, with a majority in the House and in the Senate, and we accomplished as much domestically as any President since Lyndon Johnson in those first two years. But it was really hard.”
Thanks kb. I went the wrong way with my response because I didn't want to bring all this shit up again, and so I was a dick to cgod. Glad you laid it out for me. I just don't have the patience to fight willfully ignorant blanket statements about how "bad" Obama was. On top of everything, all the problem people associate with the ACA are due to the parts that the Republicans stripped out of the plan! If the original plan had been enacted as written, the checks and balances would still be in place, and the whole program would've worked better. Now the Republicans are whining about how poorly the ACA works, after they took three of the wheels off, the clutch, and poured sugar in the gas tank!! Obama should get credit for how well it works despite Republican shenanigans! And on top of that: This is what everybody fails to understand. There are twenty million more people insured today than have ever been insured before, solely because of the ACA. And prices are going up, on average, 2-3% this year. (Except in Trump's cherry-picked state of AZ, because they started below market value, didn't have any increases to account for inflation, and are making ALL the increases this year to catch up with everyone else's rate structure.) In what program, anywhere in the world, can you add 20 million of the sickest and uninsured people to a healthcare plan, and have the rate adjustments two years later be 2-3%?!? That is a FUCKING WIN right there, my friends. ... health care costs aren't going down, but ... The fact that 20 million people have health insurance that didn't should count for something.
If your measure of the greatness of Obama is that he brought the United States from having just about the worst health care system in the developed world all the way to still having just about the worst health care in the developed world than I guess that's fair. I don't look upon it as a great success. It's not why I think he was a terrible president but it doesn't go in his triumph column. No, it doesn't become a triumph because it would have been awesome if Republicans weren't such big meanies. There are so many problems with health care. There are so many people that still can't afford the care they need to lead productive comfortable lives even after the current round of reforms. I know so many people who get their kids medical care but won't go to the doctors for their own problems because they really can't afford it, even with insurance. I think pretending something great happened is a fantasy. Did some people get access to care that they really needed but could never have afforded before? Yes. Is that a good thing? Of course. Does our system work, is it affordable for vast segments of society? Not so much. And no, I don't fail to understand that more people are insured than were before, or that people can't be denied for existing conditions or that you can keep your kids on your health care for longer. These are all good things but they don't add up to quality health care that is affordable many people. Costs went up 5% last year here. Most the plans that cover the recently insured are getting big hikes this year and some companies are pulling out of the market. Having expensive insurance so that you know your kids will be safe but that you won't use because you just can't afford it doesn't seem all that fantastic in my book. Each of us has different values and a different perspective. I really don't understand why Obama's health care reform is looked at with such a glow. It's better than nothing but I don't think it's a profound change in a system that needs profound change.
Look at it this way. Obama increased the number of Americans with insurance by a little over one half of a percentage point, not exactly sweeping change. A lot of that isn't very affordable or very good coverage but it's a win. It doesn't seem to be the kind of thing that defines a great presidency.
I'm not joking and I don't think my views are dumb. I'm comfortable with you not agreeing with me, you have your own belifes and values, doesn't make you right or me wrong to value and worry about different things. Nice knee jerk, doesn't agree with me so it's dumb.
I hate articles like this. Some geek at techdirt finds a news report on another site, Googles for about 2 minutes, and then writes an article that completely misinforms the reader while seeming plausible. This is what we lost when we lost Editors: sanity-checking doofus writers.