PILOT SPIN
Spin Zone => Spin Zone => Topic started by: Rush on December 15, 2020, 06:30:40 PM
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A long read but very eye opening.
https://www.wired.com/story/inside-the-nsas-secret-tool-for-mapping-your-social-network/
Nearly anyone in the developed world, he wrote, “can be linked to at least one fact in a computer database that an adversary could use for blackmail, discrimination, harassment, or financial or identity theft.” Revelations of “past conduct, health, or family shame,” for example, could cost a person their marriage, career, legal residence, or physical safety.
Mere creation of such a database, especially in secret, profoundly changed the balance of power between government and governed. This was the Dark Mirror embodied, one side of the glass transparent and the other blacked out.
For example, the major cell carriers, AT&T, Verizon sell all our data to the NSA for $millions! I thought the NSA had to surreptitiously collect it but no, the big tech corporations are selling us out for cash. They’re not turning it over out of patriotism to catch terrorists, they are not responding to subpoenas or warrants, they are just selling out our privacy to the government for money. All of it, every single contact we make.
And the NSA isn’t just sitting on the data, it’s running 24/7 computer analyses to form patterns about our behaviors. They form pictures of each of us with not only our first point contact, but the contacts of our contacts. We each are the center point in a web of notoriety based on who we talk to and who the people we talk to talk to and the NSA is logging all of this in real time (but only keeping it for 5 years. Yeah that makes it better.)
The only saving grace in this is that there is so much data that likely nobody is actually looking at your stuff unless you get on their radar for some reason (such as an FBI request to investigate a political enemy) and they are “supposed” to avert their eyes from U.S citizen info unless on a FISA list but Snowden said there was insufficient oversight of this. The analysts’ searches are logged and theoretically they get in trouble for abusing it but that does nothing to stop them from getting the data in the first place.
I wonder if this is the source of blackmail info for all these coward judges and RINOs.
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That article was written about a capability that existed in 2001. Just consider what has advance in the ensuing 19 years.
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In about 2000, I interviewed with the NSA to be a technology project manager. I was provisionally hired pending clearance completion and had started the ts/sci clearance. Curious about what kind of cool stuff was going on, I started researching and ran across mention of some technologies like parsing telephone conversations and emails. I know where that was headed and decided I wanted nothing to do with it...in my mind, it was a pathway to an immoral government.
So far...although I'm sure it's coming...the data stored in Utah has not been abused. At least when it does, I'll know that I had no part of it.
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In about 2000, I interviewed with the NSA to be a technology project manager. I was provisionally hired pending clearance completion and had started the ts/sci clearance. Curious about what kind of cool stuff was going on, I started researching and ran across mention of some technologies like parsing telephone conversations and emails. I know where that was headed and decided I wanted nothing to do with it...in my mind, it was a pathway to an immoral government.
So far...although I'm sure it's coming...the data stored in Utah has not been abused. At least when it does, I'll know that I had no part of it.
So during the interview process they allowed you access to their overt and covert methods of acquiring data?
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So during the interview process they allowed you access to their overt and covert methods of acquiring data?
No, the technology was being discussed in public and it didn't take much imagination to know what kind of whiz bang stuff the government could do with it.
There was no way I could stop it, the best I could do was abstain.