Whistleblower Binney says the NSA has dossiers on nearly every US citizen

http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/hope-9-whistleblower-binney-says-nsa-has-dossiers-nearly-every-us-citizen

by gasull • 14 years ago

340 223 14 years ago

networkworld.com

rorrr• 14 years ago

Well of course they do. I would be really surprised if they didn't.

That's why we should ENCRYPT EVERYTHING possible. Use HTTPS as much as you can.

WestCoastJustin• 14 years ago

I have a question about this -- maybe I'm ignorant. But using https without self-signed keys actually allows the government to peer into your communications, doesn't it? We are worried about third parties stealing your data between you and your bank for example. A bank might be a bad example as they probably already have access to their databases for compliance reasons. Can't the US government ask for the keys of these US based certificate authorities?

My point being is that https is probably equivalent to plain text when it comes to government surveillance.

gojomo• 14 years ago

Having the Certificate Authority private keys would allow an attacker to sign certificates allowing the impersonation of any entity... but it does not make other sessions, boostrapped from other legitimate certificates, transparent to passive eavesdropping.

So no, government pressure on CAs wouldn't make all https like plaintext, but it does make active impersonation possible. Some initiatives like the 'SSL Observatory' or the EFF's 'Sovereign Keys' proposal could make it possible for clients to notice when a fishy new certificate is introduced for a previously-known identity -- much like the 'key has changed' warnings you may have seen when SSHing to a host whose keys have changed since your last session.

rictic2• 14 years ago

It's not quite that bad. Even with a compromised certificate authority, it's not an invisible attack to do a man in the middle and inject their own certificate. Someone knowledgable could notice this discrepancy and raise a stink.

Furthermore, Chrome (and soon Firefox) ships some known certificates for privacy important widely used sites (e.g. the major webmail services, torproject, etc) which prevents even this attack. This defense has already caught Iran using a compromised CA.

(I'm not a cryptographer though, so please correct me if I'm wrong.)

agwa• 14 years ago

No, it's not equivalent to plain text. If they had access to certificate authority keys (or the ability to compel CAs to issue certificates on demand), they would still need to pull off an active man-in-the-middle attack to be able to decrypt communications. Practically speaking, it seems like this would be harder to accomplish on an Internet scale than simply intercepting communications. So using HTTPS as much as possible probably helps, though you're correct that if you want to be completely certain your communications are secure you should not trust the certificate authorities.

tlrobinson2• 14 years ago

They don't even need to ask for the keys.

Pretty much every OS/browser comes with root CAs belonging to the U.S. government (on OS X I see "DoD Root CA 2" and "DoD CLASS 3 Root CA", see also http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4415). As I understand it, if they wanted to, they could MITM any HTTPS connection by forging a certificate using their root CAs.

This is why people were upset when a root CA for some Chinese government agency was added to certain browsers. We don't trust the Chinese government, but we do trust the US government, I guess.

Of course, if they regularly forged certificates someone would notice. Right?

Which begs the question, how would we notice? If you diligently check certificates for sites you visit you might happen to notice facebook.com's CA suddenly changes from Verisign to the U.S. DoD.

Is there a better way? How can we automatically check that the certificates we get are legitimate?

At a minimum it would be nice if there was a warning when a cert doesn't match a previously seen one (similar to SSH)

I feel like a "web of trust" needs to be layered on top of the certificate authorities to really solve this problem. If 10 of my friends have seen the same certificate for a given website I'm inclined to believe it's legitimate. I'm also likely to trust certain organizations (EFF, etc)

Of course it's also a user interface issue. The average user wouldn't understand a single sentence I wrote above.

carsongross3• 14 years ago

That's bringing a knife to a tank fight, my man.

Better, IMO, to just assume they read and listen to everything digital, and work around it.

ars• 14 years ago

Remember "BEGIN ECHELON BLOCK"?

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/05/31/what_are_those_words...

http://ben.reser.org/echelon/

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:drmJsXD...

ams61104• 14 years ago

The problem with encryption is that the data still have to be in the clear at the endpoints to be useful. That's where it'll be nabbed, by surreptitious keyloggers, screen scrapers, filesystem scanners, etc. Decrypting data in transit is still a very difficult if not impossible proposition as far as I know.

waterlesscloud• 14 years ago

I'm sure these would never be used for political gain.

snambi• 14 years ago

Sure, they have all data about someone. But, what is the use? It is like searching a needle in a haystack.

carsongross3• 14 years ago

Until you piss off or catch the eye of someone with access to it. Then you'll find out just how quickly your particular needle can be found in that haystack.

tikhonj2• 14 years ago

Or like searching for a web page on the internet!

Not to mention all the fun machine learning and analysis that could be done.

mcantelon• 14 years ago

The NSA likely has more advanced tech than we do.

dredmorbius3• 14 years ago

""If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged."

- Cardinal Richelieu

dman3• 14 years ago

What if every sentence began with - "Hypothetically speaking"

re_todd• 14 years ago

I think my ex-girlfriend studied under this Richelieu guy.

unimpressive• 14 years ago

This attitude got plenty of usenet posters in trouble. [0]

[0]: Exhibit A; http://groups.google.com/groups/dir?hl=en&lr=&safe=o...

politician2• 14 years ago

Ever play "Six degrees of Kevin Bacon"? Doubtless that they are building a comprehensive social/activity/location/finance graph of as many people as possible so that when someone pisses off the wrong people they can be dealt with completely.

waiwai9333• 14 years ago

Ethics, morality and legality aside, I'd be really curious to see what information is actually stored in these "dossiers", besides (presumably) one's name, address, and other details that other branches of the government legitimately have.

carsongross3• 14 years ago

Oh, don't worry: ethics, morality and legality are being very much set aside.

waiwai9333• 14 years ago

Well, yes, I know that. ;) I meant that ethically, morally, and legally, I wouldn't want to know what they have (the NSA knowing is enough; better to destroy it than make it all public, probably), but I'm curious nonetheless.

tikhonj2• 14 years ago

Is that the sort of thing you can ask for with a FOIA request?

If you have some spare time it might be worth trying--it certainly couldn't hurt. I'm not familiar enough with the actual procedure to say if it would be particularly difficult or not.

waiwai9333• 14 years ago

Not really, unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately, if one is speaking practically and not philosophically, since I'd rather terrorists not know what intelligence agencies have on them).

FOIA has an extensive list of exemptions, and pretty much anything relating to do with national security is exempt from FOIA requests. And well, it's called the National Security Agency for a reason; even though the information probably isn't legitimately related to national security, can you prove that it isn't, keeping in mind that you can't see it until you've proven that it's not?

jberryman• 14 years ago

If you try you will get a form letter basically saying that spying on Americans is not in the NSA charter, so they don't have any info on you. Tried it in 2005-ish myself.

eloisius• 14 years ago

I doubt Congress can even effectively subpoena for that kind of information.

h2000• 14 years ago

I think the great majority of the dossiers states only 'mostly harmless'.

grandalf• 14 years ago

I'm guessing that it's a timeline with some useful visualizations that allow the viewer to see patterns based on all the available data.

They'd have income/employment/tax data, your "network" as defined by google, facebook, the phones #s you dial, the phone #s that call you, family, classmates, etc.

They'd also have information about (and tools to easily search for) internet community involvement, travel history, banking history, credit score, and TONS of clickstream data.

The challenge for the government is that there is so much data on each person (available already or available with a few automated warrants) that creating tools to facilitate automated and human pattern recognition are crucial.

There are likely lots of metrics (formulated similarly to something like a credit score or a life insurance policy quote) that are updated automatically and indicate the chances that you'll do various things.

While it's very unlikely that most of us are of any interest whatsoever to authorities, the power of this information is when it can be used on someone else connected to you who is a target. Suppose the system flags 500 individuals as potential domestic terrorists. There is humint needed to rule these out as quacks, which the intel in your dossier might be useful for.

I think that what we have to keep in mind is that the state having these powers is tolerable now only b/c we are still in the infancy of this kind of technology and those in power haven't really developed a clear path toward totalitarianism yet, though now and then they start to come close.

samstave2• 14 years ago

I'd be quite positive that these "dossiers" are compiled specifically to correlate HUMAN->SN->DL|Criminal Record|[ONLINE WEDSITE]USER_NAME

I am positive that the NSAs current charter is to associate the real people to the virtual AMONG MANY OTHER THINGS.

So, with all that said - I have met and talked with a range of NSA personalities and they are the blackest of the black hats. DO NOT TRUST.

ryanwaggoner• 14 years ago

This would have lacked any credibility whatsoever if it weren't for the caps.

dhx• 14 years ago

There is no need to guess—look at the screenshots and screencasts at:

http://www.palantir.com

smokeyj• 14 years ago

I wonder if MLK would exist if this were around 50 years ago.

mjwalshe4• 14 years ago

the FBI collected a lot of dirt on MLK - Hoover was obsesed

saraid216• 14 years ago

Out of curiosity, how many other people had the gut reaction of, "Awesome! I have a dossier!"

dredmorbius3• 14 years ago

Are my eyes really brown?

javert5• 14 years ago

I would like to ask them my hair color, because it's a weird color and I honestly don't know what it is.

bobsy• 14 years ago

If this is true doesn't it mean that Bin Laden won the war on terror?

Every time I go to the airport I think this. Those full body scanners? Thanks to Bin Laden, now you practically get strip searched for every flight. You have to take off your shoes. You cannot take drinks on a plane.

You then have everyone on edge no matter where you go. You and a friend play CounterStrike. You get on the bus and start talking about good locations to plant the bomb. You will probably be wrestled to the floor by some over-zealous commuter.

It doesn't surprise me if this is true. The US attitude to privacy and civil rights have been becoming more like China's every year since 2001.

conradfr• 14 years ago

The U.S (or the West) did not change its politics in the Middle-East and is still not an Islamic country so I don't think Bin Laden won.

Now maybe the U.S citizens lost ...

cstavish• 14 years ago

It's true that the US hasn't changed its Middle-East policies (although I'd argue that's the only way to eradicate Islamic terrorism), but it's important to note that bin Laden did not target the US due to its secularism, but for its foreign policy. He even said that if he wanted to attack a country just for being secular, he'd have attacked Sweden.

toyg• 14 years ago

I don't think Bin Laden ever wanted to "convert" his "enemies", but rather to destroy or frighten them.

Considering the amount of money thrown into the Afghan pit (which still is a factor affecting the ability of Western countries to sustain periods of economic turmoil, and even to replenish their own arsenals -- see UK defence cuts) and the hysteric approach to public spaces since 2001, I'd say he's been fairly successful in his endeavours.

Which is not that surprising, to be fair. After all, he was originally trained by the CIA, and was backed by Saudi money and the Pakistani military.

biomechanica• 14 years ago

What I think it actually means is this:

It has given the United States an excuse to do that they are doing to its people.

The whole system is based upon fear, which is exactly what the so called "terrorists" wanted to do.

The government(s) of this world don't particularly enjoy the thought of its population having to ability to think for themselves. How can they (temporarily) suspend this? Fear.

ilaksh3• 14 years ago

"The War on Terror"

I wish that people would learn what "The War on Terror" really is.

The United States IS like other countries, including China, now and in the past.

In 2001 there was an event in the United States which was very similar to the 1933 Reichstag fire in Berlin. Very few people can accept that reality, so this comment will probably be buried.

I don't think people even know what a State is. The harsh truth is that the State is not your friend.

People are truly living in a make-believe fairy tale land.

EvilTerran• 14 years ago

Alternatively, if your post does get buried, it might be because you bald-faced assert that people who don't agree with you lack learning, can't accept reality, don't know what a state is, and are living in a make-believe fairy tale land.

In other words, "if you disagree, you're a big stoopid thicko". You're clearly not up for reasonable discussion, you're just soap-boxing.

Well, that and whining about the possibility of being buried, as some kind of reverse-psychology downmod defence.

Angostura• 14 years ago

You neglected to add those all important words "wake up sheeple".

You're making extraordinary claims regarding the parallels with the Reichtag fire. I won't ask for extraordinary evidence, just reasonable evidence.

thaumaturgy• 14 years ago

> If this is true doesn't it mean that Bin Laden won the war on terror?

Not exactly: http://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/wcpls/this_i_my_friends...

fromhet• 14 years ago

It was pretty quickly concluded that that guy was straight out bullshitting.

The quotes are from OBL's videos that he made and leaked out to mainly Al Jazeera. They were made after all of this made happened, and OBL obviously knew to read the papers and know how to make good propaganda.

Be sceptics, fokes!

ZoFreX2• 14 years ago

Bin Laden's aim was to push the US into a war that would bankrupt them. I'd call that mission accomplished.

dfischer2• 14 years ago

Importantly, to remove their presence out of the middle east and change their foreign policy. This is not happening though so not accomplished.

InclinedPlane• 14 years ago

Hardly. Bin Laden's aim was to end the "corrupting influence" of the western world on the Islamic world, and to achieve that by getting the US and other western powers to withdraw from military, economic, and cultural interaction with the Islamic world.

As far as what happened within the western world, whether it destroyed itself or continued on in some aspect, he didn't much care (at least in the short-term, in the long-term I'm sure he believed that the whole world would be under the power of a new Caliphate).

kamaal• 14 years ago

Muslim here.

I never understood both sides and their actions. I mean I find both Islamic fundamentalism and American actions all round globe both equally dumb.

I don't think OBL ever had it as an explicit aim to pull down US militarily or culturally transform US into a Islamic state. That is impossible, and I assume somebody like him already understood that. I guess his aim was to drag US into a war and then reduce them to a state USSR, now russia was in 1990 post Afghanistan war. Long wars benefit nobody. They are a huge drain on man power, economy and morale of a nation. Its actually surprising that US fell for it. I was expecting more of a Intelligence based response where the CIA would hunt him down and kill him, instead of wasting trillions dollars.

On the other hand. Afghans seem to be very stubborn people. They don't give up easily no matter how shitty state they are in. Its just in their blood and culture to not accept foreign occupation over them. Even the British that had the entire Indian subcontinent under them couldn't conquer them. In the recent history alone, every body knows what has happened of USSR after going there. So no matter how bad the Taliban is, they still consider them as their own country men compared to Americans who actually released them from their bondage.

As a moderate muslim, I feel bad every time I'm pulled up for an ideology which I have nothing to do with. I've been a subject of religious discrimination many times since 911. I've been asked to come for extra rounds for job interviews, pulled up separately and checked at building security points, had troubles to open bank accounts, asked to delay visa filing for visiting abroad etc innumerable number of times. I feel having an arabicized name a huge liability to carry, a kind of burden for which you have to pay no matter even if you have nothing to do with their ideology.

On the other hand I see so much turmoil in the west, due to the war ordinary people like me having to pay for no mistake of theirs. Wars, economics crisis etc.

When I look at all this, I can't help but wonder that perpetrators of these crimes actually won.

euroclydon2• 14 years ago

Its actually surprising that US fell for it.

Yep. Bush would have been a hero if he hadn't fallen for it. Compassionate conservatism, expressed in Medicare Part C. Tax cuts combined with modest military expansion would have held the deficit in check.

But remember the pundits saying, "this one calles for boots on the ground"? Even Jon Stewart showed a clip of Bush or someone making a compassionate statement, and commented "you're killing my blood lust." And he meant it!

I don't guess Clinton wouldn't have fallen for it -- he didn't during all of OBL's significant attacks in the 90's.

ynniv2• 14 years ago

Its actually surprising that US fell for it.

The US didn't fall for anything - 9/11 was an opportunity to advance military goals in the Middle East. We planned to invade Afghanistan before the event[1]. About three weeks afterward this plan was expanded to include seven countries in ten years ("Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran")[2]. Some of those were accomplished by the "Arab Spring", but the State Department wasn't uninvolved in that and asked twitter to reschedule maintenance so that it would be "an effective communications tool" during the 2009 Iranian election[3].

The only confusing actor is Bin Laden, who attacked a superpower that had already expressed a desire to invade his people.

[1 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/1550366.stm]

[2 http://www.salon.com/2007/10/12/wesley_clark/]

[3 http://www.reuters.com/article/2009/06/16/us-iran-election-t...]

accountswu5• 14 years ago

Responding to update glanch that his profile is probably marked as a spammer and all comments made by him are greyed out (he probably is seeing them ok.

Begin quote:

glanch 35 minutes ago | link [dead]

"Fell for it"?

It's easy to "fall for it" when you are in the position to make a LOT of money for that fall. Cheney. Halliburton. Exclusive government contracts. Sickening.

nowarninglabel• 14 years ago

>I don't think OBL ever had it as an explicit aim to pull down US militarily or culturally transform US into a Islamic state

Actually, if you read his letters, he did state some of these as his goals, but more importantly, his advisor, Ayman al-Zawahiri, had this goal in mind, as it was made explicit in "The Shade of the Quran" by Sayyid Qatb who was Zawahiri's mentor in Egypt after they spent time in prison together.

geraldo3• 14 years ago

"I was expecting more of a Intelligence based response where the CIA would hunt him down and kill him, instead of wasting trillions dollars."

You have to realize, while the money is wasted from the perspective of tax payers, it's a profit from the perspective of, say, weapons manufacturers (just taking those as an example).

Sure, they "wasted" money, that wasn't theirs, on things that enhanced their control. The time and resources of common people actually do get wasted, but other than that, the whole thing was and continues to be a success. Just don't lump a whole nation, the citizens and the policy makers, together. That can only lead to confusion. War is a racket, so is the war on terror - and if these fundamentalists didn't conveniently exist, others would have to be created.

olavk3• 14 years ago

Why do you think that the ultimate goal of Bin Laden was to increase surveillance in the US and to annoy travelers at airports?

TheCondor• 14 years ago

This and the other comments refer to "battles" in the war on terror, if you will.

I'm not sure it's how OBL planned but it does kind of look like he might have been happy with our trajectory.

amalag• 14 years ago

Bin Laden said he wanted to bankrupt the US by drawing them into quagmires, I think he won on that front as well.

intended• 14 years ago

there was an interesting discussion on this on reddit -

"technically Osama bin Laden himself stated that 9/11 was to wake up the american people, to commit an act so harsh towards actual Americans, that they would say "why me" and then research the situation.."

Poster then links to the source quotes from Osama where he explains his motives and reasons. Interesting read, if only for the direct quotes, which are pretty essential for this discussion. Until he linked it, I never realized how strange it was that these discussions happen all the time, without many people actually being able to pull up the source material.

Link to source: http://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/wcpls/this_i_my_friends...

golgo13• 14 years ago

Incorrect, you can take drinks on the plane. I call them "Freedom Cokes" and "Freedom Water." As long as you buy them on the other side of the TSA, you can take Cokes on planes. Sure, the Cokes probably came from the same truck as your local gas station, but that doesn't matter.

tripzilch• 14 years ago

> If this is true doesn't it mean that Bin Laden won the war on terror?

in all fairness, it's not like the American people put up much of a fight ...

hooande• 14 years ago

About ten years ago, the NSA got direct access to every phone call, text and email sent via AT&T from the west coast to asia. Every. Single. Message. Set up shop next to the servers and just copied all of the data coming across.

I think that by "dossiers" this guy meant "social network information from communication logs". They can start with your number (any number) and see who communicates with it. And then see who communicates with those people, and so on until they find a link to a terrorist or whatever.

If you're doing something that the government doesn't want you to do, use a burner phone. And drive 30 minutes from your home, and use a proxy server to connect to the internet. Any federal agent can get a record of every call you make with a boilerplate warrant. The NSA can dig up the full text of all of your conversations with a tech support ticket. Welcome to 2012.

If it makes you feel any better, facebook has a similar level of information about you and they haven't done much harm with it.

nl3• 14 years ago

And drive 30 minutes from your home, and use a proxy server to connect to the internet

I'd love to hear some details of what you are proposing here. Because right now it doesn't sound like you know what you are talking about.

If it makes you feel any better, facebook has a similar level of information about you and they haven't done much harm with it.

Um. No they don't.

zcid• 14 years ago

Your location can be triangulated even if you don't use a cell phone registered to yourself.

Using a VPN, you reduce the chances that your internet use will be traced back to you.

Facebook has a staggering amount of personal information about most of their users. While not necessarily on the same level as personal phone calls, it should still be a concern of anyone that uses social networks.

Try to actually make a case next time you post. Saying "Nuh uh, nuh uh" over and over makes you look like an ass.

tristanj• 14 years ago

On your second point, here's incomplete list of data that facebook stores about its users. Note that they keep all wall posts, messages, tags, and photos even after the user deletes it from his profile

http://europe-v-facebook.org/EN/Data_Pool/data_pool.html

Of course, they won't have any of your data if you don't have an account, which might be what you're trying to get at.

snapdata• 14 years ago

>facebook has a similar level of information about you and they haven't done much harm with it.

Facebook does not have anywhere near the level of surveillance that the NSA possesses. Please read the article again and do some research on the case. That being said, Facebook does have a lot of information about you. It will remain confidential until CISPA passes, at which point it will be legally beneficial for them to hand over this information to the government.

neilk• 14 years ago

> If it makes you feel any better, facebook has a similar level of information about you and they haven't done much harm with it.

How do you know?

toomuchcoffee2• 14 years ago

Because they say so. Ain't that enough?

diminoten• 14 years ago

Let them. I still believe in the justice system enough to be willing to put this sort of thing to a legal test.

gregcmartin• 14 years ago

Yeah it's called Facebook

mtgx2• 14 years ago

You're probably not too far from the truth:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57471570-93/facebook-scans-...

david927• 14 years ago

CIA's Facebook Program Dramatically Cuts Agency's Costs [The Onion]:

http://www.theonion.com/video/cias-facebook-program-dramatic...

mariuolo• 14 years ago

Anyone surprised?

bfung• 14 years ago

If this were true, we wouldn't really need to conduct the census (http://www.census.gov/), right?

Perhaps the NSA has tools like pipl or spokeo to build dossiers, but not that it has every person on file, right now.

mjwalshe4• 14 years ago

Depends what you mean by dossier I am sure the NSA has a definative list of all Us residents names and SSN's but thats not a dossier in the same way That the FBI under hover had about anyone even sligtly progressive.

Id be more worried by the fact the in the USA its common practice to register with the govenment what political party you support.

saryant2• 14 years ago

Registering your political party is a state thing, not federal. Nor does every state require it. My state, Texas, does not.

You can see all the information asked for when registering to vote here:

https://webservices.sos.state.tx.us/vrapp/index.asp

mjwalshe4• 14 years ago

So I am registering with "local" govenment FFS that is even worse at least at the national level there is some oversight and Journalists holding teh executive to account.

chao-2• 14 years ago

Speaking as a youngin' who grew up with the internet (US citizen and just now 24), I've never expected any privacy for as long as I can remember. Of any sort. Only an odd sense of my insignificance providing a minor smokescreen. I accept that if I ever obtained any real notoriety, all would be laid bare in due course.

When I read articles like this, I don't wonder if anyone is surprised by these things anymore. I would hope it's understood. My mind instead turns to these questions:

"Who out there expects some eventual return of privacy?" and "What degree of effort do they expect it to require, relative to what they gain?" Surely at some point it is not worth the time/effort to reform "the system", and personal mitigation strategies are more feasible.

I rarely find myself in the role of doomsayer, but I've never lived in a world where the word "privacy" didn't already have an implicit asterisk following it. So my stance doesn't feel apocalyptic, it just feels like the way the world has always been.

javert5• 14 years ago

I'm probably about a year and a half older than you, a US citizen, and I don't feel that way at all. The government used to not be spying on me. Then, in the last decade, the chance that it would started to rise. In the last 5 years, it became likely. Now, with this story, if it's true, we know that it's almost certainly spying on me. (And to clarify, I'm not a criminal or anything remotely criminal in any way, shape or form.)

Right now, spying on me.

Now, it may just be recording the info and looking for triggers. Wonder if this post will be a trigger. It's definitely possible.

So there has been a massive ramp-up in unethical electronic spying, and unlike you, I have (for some reason) been alert to it.

chao-2• 14 years ago

The government used to not be spying on me... In the last 5 years, it became likely.

I'm going to pick on the 5 years & 10 years estimate, if you don't mind.

If no one was spying on you then, it was because you were a child or teenager, and presumably not very interesting. If you were someone of major consequence five years ago (2007, to keep things in perspective), or even a decade ago (2002), you'd surely have at least a minor notation, blurb or profile somewhere. If our government wasted time and money tracking John Lennon in the 60's, it's hard to imagine that by 2007 there wasn't at least cursory analysis available about anyone with a job and credit card. Never mind anyone who attended college/university, purchased car insurance or signed up for a grocery store rewards card.

Let me be clear: I'm not saying the government is specifically tracking on your grocery bill. Instead, you're letting someone else do so, and the data is simply available upon request from most reasonable actors.

Further temporal perspective: Google had long gone public by 2007, and people were long crying foul on privacy with respect to it. So the government may not have even been the first to open some unbeknownst profile on you. It may have just been some data aggregator who put your SSN, DoB and address up for sale after your general practitioner's secretary got some malware (I'm being hypothetical of course, but hopefully you understand the premise).

A counterpoint to my argument is that this is the government, not corporation X or shady data reseller Y. I concede that there is a different feeling associated with the government spying on you (with the assumption of legality), and some third-party actor who maybe, some day, could be brought to trial (we hope?).

Yet the practical result is the same: there are people building profiles of us which we will never see, and judging how best to relate to us based on them. They have been doing it for a lot longer than five years, and I don't see the trend reversing any time soon. It doesn't really freak me out, either. In a way, it just makes sense.

fierarul• 14 years ago

The NSA probably has "dossiers" on the whole world.

For example, in order to get an US Visa from the embassy they take your fingerprints. Your visa form also has a lot of data. At least that has to be centralized somewhere.

Add your online accounts to the mix and it's safe to say they have enough info about everybody.

jayfuerstenberg2• 14 years ago

Might I suggest having some fun with one's dossier?

Like randomly doing the exact opposite of what you would ordinarily do on a daily basis. Here are some ideas...

1. Take the bus instead of driving your car.

2. Buy a pack of cigarettes if you're not a smoker.

3. Buy magazines you would never normally buy.

4. Attend a political meeting of the party you typically oppose.

5. Buy vegetarian food for a week if you're a meat eater.

etc...

If the dossier is dry and not a useful tool for profiling you then you don't have anything to worry about. If on the other hand the dossier is more sinister in nature you can dilute its usefulness by being a different person every now and then to throw it off track.

JonnieCache• 14 years ago

Or you could just do all those things anyway, because it will improve your life. Maybe not the cigarettes.

Mesmoria• 14 years ago

You would have to do this enough for it to be statistically significant otherwise it probably just averaged away.

OTOH....once might be seen as smoke-screening, making you more suspicious.

law4• 14 years ago

Apple has a patent on this.[1]

[1] http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sec...

jayfuerstenberg2• 14 years ago

I wonder if the wiping techniques used to securely erase data from government HDDs would count as prior art here.

keithpeter• 14 years ago

"Domestically, they're pulling together all the data about virtually every U.S. citizen in the country and assembling that information, building communities that you have relationships with, and knowledge about you; what your activities are; what you're doing."

A plot for a novel: NSA operative comes across an identity with no links to any other identity, no social network history. Just an isolated node... curious, she starts investigating and finds all avenues blocked, and her boss asks her to stop. Intrigued, Agent Hernandez continues on her own time...

freehunter• 14 years ago

Mulder, is this another X file?

lubujackson2• 14 years ago

Surprise ending, it is a "Forever Alone" guy.

minikomi• 14 years ago

Where's little bobby tables when you need him?

alan_cx• 14 years ago

Remember people, its you who are the real enemy of the state. Its you they fear more than anything else.

kitsune_• 14 years ago

Switzerland had a huge surveillance scandal during the 80's. It was named "Fichenskandal" or in English, "Secret files scandal".

More than 700'000 people or organizations were targeted, usually people on the left: unions, feminists, environmentalists etc.

A friend of my father runs an independent book store and he requested his files after the scandal was made public. He received a stack of paper over 10 inches high. The government pretty much had every part of his life on file. From mundane stuff to him participating in demonstrations (protesting for women's suffrage * , environmental issues). This is a guy who was never arrested in his life. Yet they had a record of pretty much everything.

This was in a time with limited technological capabilities.

In the 70's, the police probably took photographs of public gatherings and sent them to a special group which in turn had to identify the participants with the help of a magnifying glass and reference files.

Nowadays with have facial recognition techniques, cameras everywhere. Yes, this is some Public Enemy No. 1 shit, but it's a good time to be paranoid.

You can be sure that every form of electronic communication is in some form or another under surveillance by governments around the globe.

* Switzerland finally allowed women to vote in... drum roll... 1971.

Iv• 14 years ago

I wanted to work for Cyc Corp. several years ago. They have an interesting software and before Watson, maybe the closest thing to AI that there is out there. IT took me some time to understand why it was so hard to be a candidate as a non-US citizen : it was later disclosed that they were participants in the Total Information Awareness project. Its purported goal was to have a ten-pages file on every human on the planet. It is not clear that it has been discontinued.

mtgx2• 14 years ago

Is there a good reason for any country to have spies at all, especially for internal matters?

I feel that spying on other countries (let alone on own citizens) shouldn't exist at all, but it has become accepted by societies as something that the Governments just have to do, to "make their job easier", just like even FBI said recently that they'd prefer if they didn't need to get warrants, because it would make their job easier. Having a democracy and rights for people must be really tough on authorities, or at least that's how they sound.

kennon2• 14 years ago

I'm curious why you think international spying is unnecessary. Until countries cease to compete for limited resources, it seems to me like an inevitability.

debacle• 14 years ago

The corporate/bureaucratic symbiosis means that spying on your citizens is seen as necessary to control the populace.

Zarkonnen• 14 years ago

I remember going to a demo against the fiches. I had a sign with a fish on it. The fish was crossed out. I was five.

But, seriously: the impulse to keep files on "internal enemies" is strong in any state, but it's come to the fore in a scary way in the last decade.

fduran• 14 years ago

"Switzerland finally allowed women to vote in... drum roll... 1971." the last canton to allow women to vote was forced to do it as late as 1990 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appenzell_Innerrhoden

beedogs2• 14 years ago

I really fucking hate the right wing and its authoritarian ideology. It's like there are two separate and distinct species of people on this planet: those with empathy and compassion for their fellow man, and these kinds of assholes who just want nothing but control.

It's one of the reasons I got out of the US. My worry is I won't be allowed to return one day.

dfischer2• 14 years ago

If you really think this is the result of the right wing politicians you're kidding yourself.

law4• 14 years ago

I'd even claim that the left wing has a greater propensity to engage in this conduct, albeit more subtly. For example, one side effect of the Affordable Care Act is the federal government knowing which Americans have health insurance. While this doesn't prove they have access to your health records, it's nevertheless troubling that they have direct evidence of whether you're insured (and whether it's ``Cadillac'' insurance) simply by examining tax returns.

3pt14159• 14 years ago

This isn't about the left wing or the right wing, it's the authoritarian wing. Jeff Flake, Ron Paul, Justin Amish, Gary Johnson, Rand Paul are all right wing and don't want to see you under the eye or chain.

On the authoritarian left, we have Obama:

- Ordered the killing of US citizens with no due process.

- Signed the National Defence Authorization Act, so now any American, at home or abroad, can be locked up with no trial at Guantanamo.

Many other examples. Not all the right is authoritarian and not all authoritarians are right.

beedogs2• 14 years ago

I consider Obama right-wing. He's only left-wing compared to other American politicians, and he's really not all that left-wing even then.

ams61104• 14 years ago

You may be (roughly) correct about the two kinds of people, another way of saying that people are either "normal" or "sociopathic." But they don't cleave politically right and left on that basis. And there is plenty of empathy and compassion for one's fellow man on the political right, though there is a difference in philosophy about what helps him and what doesn't.

gnaritas2• 14 years ago

Worse, there a difference in philosophy about what is or isn't a problem, which is where most of the issues lie.

twoodfin• 14 years ago

Everyone in this thread seems to miss the fact that if the NSA were deliberately keeping files on communications between Americans in America that would be a really big deal. But AFAIK, no one in a position to know anything has even alleged this.

treelovinhippie2• 14 years ago

I think soon people will realize that the only defense against this kind of data collection (and it's subsequent uses - which grow more powerful everyday) is to record your own life and know the same (if not more than) what governments and corporations know about you.

boronine• 14 years ago

How will that work as a defense?

treelovinhippie2• 14 years ago

Record your entire life (everything). Encrypt and store the data. Workout some way for data scientists to anonymously and securely experiment on the data such that privacy is maintained and the data remains in your control and ownership.

The idea is that there are big companies out there now (including the government) that have huge databases of information on you, and they've been working hard for many years now in the background to find useful patterns in the data in order to sell-to/manipulate/control you.

If you can do the same research with your own data, you can know in advance (or catch-up to) what those companies already know about you. With that knowledge, you could perhaps develop something like an anti-malware application for "you".

So if sometime in the future, you begin seeing very targeted ads that begin manipulating your purchasing behaviour or even manipulating your opinions and thoughts... then the system could notice these attacks and warn you (because it knows your data, your interests and your weaknesses).

The end-game of what these companies are doing is to have so much data on individuals (and the distribution channels), that they are able to subtly manipulate and program their minds without the individual even noticing.

If you know the algorithms they've discovered within your data, you can protect your mind.

Anyway, that's just one advantage. I'm working on a startup now that does this.

jakeonthemove• 14 years ago

Why is this a surprise to anyone? Governments will always want to have as much info as possible on anyone, especially their own citizens, and the US has been number 1 for a long time.

With Facebook, Twitter and face recognition, privacy is truly dead. Heck, even from public records you can get a lot of information about anyone, and if you have their SSN, you can increase that to a metric sheet ton. Any database and method of communication can be easily tapped for surveillance, too, so if they really want you, they're gonna get you.

locusm3• 14 years ago

I live in the Southern Hemisphere and like most 40 something year olds I follow whats happening in the States from a distance. I've been reading and watching a fair bit of Jacob Appelbaum and reading Glenn Greenwald's posts which seem to be fair and well written. Democracy Now also does some interesting interviews with Jacob and William Binney.

Some stuff I recommend to have a look at... in no particular order.

Challenging the Surveillance State - Pt. 1 to Pt.4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VCTvs7UXa4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ueDTOfEqey8&feature=relmf... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwm6VeYFdKM&feature=relmf... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fao4Z8JooxY&feature=relmf...

http://www.democracynow.org/2012/4/20/exclusive_national_sec...

Jacob Appelbaum (Part 1 & 2) Digital Anti-Repression Workshop - April 26 2012 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHoJ9pQ0cn8&feature=relmf... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9fByRmAHgU&feature=relmf...

Glenn's Salon Posts http://www.salon.com/writer/glenn_greenwald/

Freestyler_3• 14 years ago

Just lifting the curtain will hopefully be enough, if you really need to say anything after doing that...

We are sitting in the theater and the curtains are closed, we are reading the program. The program says "It's okay, nothing is happening behind the curtain." After everyone read their program 99% of the crowd leaves because they think they know enough. Then that 1% is eagerly waiting to see the show. And there are a few people trying to sabotage the place and open the curtains so that the people can see the show. Those curtains are not going to open themselves.

lwhi• 14 years ago

I suppose a Facebook profile could correspond to 'dossier' in most senses of the word.

rglover• 14 years ago

I've always assumed when talking online, over the phone, wherever, that even if they (this is ambiguously referencing the government as a whole) weren't at that moment: someone could listen in if they wanted to. It's surprising to think that people still believe in the existence of total privacy (albeit any form of privacy).

tomjen32• 14 years ago

This is going to be embarasing the next time there is a major terror attack (hopefully it won't happen, but statistically it is likely eventually) when it turns out that they had the data on everybody but somehow didn't act on it.

ams61104• 14 years ago

It's far easier, after you know what happened, to go back to the data and "connect the dots" to claim it should have been foreseen and acted upon. But beforehand, the dots could have been connected in any number of permutations and paths, so it becomes impossible to act on every possibility that can be forecast in advance.

tomjen32• 14 years ago

Which will properly be their excuse too. Won't stop them from being flayed in the media.

BlackNapoleon• 14 years ago

In-Q-Tel was one of the first investors in Google anyways

VikingCoder4• 14 years ago

Math is fun!

You can buy a 2 TB HD for $99.99 right now.

The population of the United States is 311,591,917.

That's 7057 bytes per citizen, for a penny under a Franklin.

The Complete Works of William Shakespeare can be downloaded from Project Gutenberg in EPUB format, in 2.3 MB.

Therefore, if you wanted to have William Shakespeare write as much text about every single citizen in the United States, as he wrote in all of his Complete Works, you would need 341.74 of those HDs.

Therefore, the raw storage would cost you $34,196.58.

The NSA's annual budget is around $3.6 billion.

Every year, the NSA could buy enough hard drive space to store 105,273 times as much text as the Complete Works of William Shakespeare, on every single U.S. citizen.

thereallurch• 14 years ago

While you make a good point, your end number is wildly inaccurate.

1) I highly doubt the NSA is buying $100 dollar low grade hard drives. I bet this data is backed up at least twice per site, at multiple sites.

2) The data is not unstructured, it will be structured in some sort of database. Storing your facebook photos alone will be potentially hundreds of megabytes.

3) I doubt NSA is spending it's entire budget every year on hard drives.

VikingCoder4• 14 years ago

Yes, that's why I quite carefully said, "Every year, the NSA COULD..."

Emphasis on the COULD. It's to emphasize how cheap storage is, and how relatively few U.S. Citizens there are. In our day-to-day lives, we think 311 Million is an enormous number. But in the scale of computing, it's actually quite small.

My real point is: storing the data is no longer a challenge. If you want someone (businesses, governments, etc.) to not store data about every citizen of the U.S., you need laws, regulations, and checks and balances.

pessimizer2• 14 years ago

1) If he's three or four orders of magnitude off, his point still stands.

2) Also, the data could be almost completely unstructured. You mine the data that you have to create structure. If you toss anything, or prematurely optimize things, you're missing out on what the algorithms that you come up with 10 years from now will give you.

3) If you're using enough redundancy to multiply $35,000 into $3,000,000,000, you're insane.

dman3• 14 years ago

Storing the text is easy - deciding what text is relevant enough to store is hard.

VikingCoder4• 14 years ago

If you had the NSA's budget, you probably wouldn't need to decide what text is relevant to store.

sliverstorm2• 14 years ago

Why does this matter?

ck2• 14 years ago

If this is true, the NSA knows which of every cop is dirty in the country because they have full access to financial, voice and email records.

And doesn't do anything about it.

elorant• 14 years ago

If they have records for every US citizen, they'd probably have records also for anyone visiting the country.

toomuchcoffee2• 14 years ago

TL;DR - The Committee is outraged that the NSA is developing expensive software in house, rather than from Google or Oracle. But no one raises an eyebrow at what that software is being used for domestically.

Create• 14 years ago

they had to demonstrate, that they "gave up" in-house dev

http://accumulo.apache.org/

guscost• 14 years ago

For the record, I'd be surprised if mine is less than five years old.

bhaile• 14 years ago

From the article: "In the short video interview, Binney explained a bit more about the NSA spying on Americans: "Domestically, they're pulling together all the data about virtually every U.S. citizen in the country and assembling that information, building communities that you have relationships with, and knowledge about you; what your activities are; what you're doing. So the government is accumulating that kind of information about every individual person and it's a very dangerous process.""

I imagine this is where Palantir is being used. About building the connections through large data sets on the science of ontology.

aidenn0• 14 years ago

Bishop: Ah. You're the guys I hear breathing on the other end of my phone. Dick Gordon: No, that's the FBI. We're not chartered for domestic surveillance. Bishop: Oh, I see. You just overthrow governments. Set up friendly dictators. Dick Gordon: No, that's the CIA. We protect our government's communications, we try to break the other fella's codes. We're the good guys, Marty. Bishop: Gee, I can't tell you what a relief that is...Dick.

dean• 14 years ago

When I was in school, there was a girl in one of my classes who highlighted every line of every page in the textbook. I told her that highlighting every page was the same as highlighting no pages. You end up with undifferentiated information. You're no further ahead than when you started.

In the same way, the NSA having a dossier on everyone is the same as them having a dossier on no one.

locusm3• 14 years ago

My Binney delivered a keynote at Hope9 too recently

http://privacysos.org/node/759

antidoh• 14 years ago

I'm beginning to believe that all governments and their security/intelligence forces tend toward a Stazi mean.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stazi

Whistleblower Binney says the NSA has dossiers on nearly every US citizen

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