sweasel.com

Snowden’s a hero, but a tragic one. Things will end badly for him and it is unlikely that he’ll have accomplished anything more than speed up rate at which the gulf widens between the govt/collectivist camp and the mundane/individual camp.

As I understand the PRISM system, what’s happening is all information about phone calls, emails, etc., is stored but the govt agents aren’t allowed to look at any specific info without FISC permission. This data store supposedly contains so-called metadata describing the communication but not the actual content of same.

Yeah. Right. That’s up there at the credibility level of “I promise not to come in your mailbox” and “The check is in your mouth.”

Addendum: Metadata is data. It has the “meta-” prefix when it is abstracted one level from what the data is about. The distinction is real but minor.

PRISM looks like a user interface to a monster data base. It looks like query input system for non tech users.

There have only been two power point slides made public. Apparently there are thirty nine more.

Even when they DO go through FISC, it’s not exactly comforting. h/t Reason

…FISC has declined just 11 of the more than 33,900 surveillance requests made by the government in 33 years….

Oh – and one of the 11 requests that was declined was to look at Moussaoui’s (the “20th” 9/11 hijacker) computer. Great.

We are in the very BEST of hands.

And was it a 3-inch, you think? Bonus points if it was a 4; don’t see those much in the vanilla south.

in the vanilla south

‘ouston isn’t The South, though it is awful far South.

The real issue that they are debating in contemplating his asshatery or no is their fear that the magical system known as a security clearance has somehow failed. One of their own broke rank. But he was cleared! He was inspected! He passed! How could this be?!? Poor sod. Brave man, but he and all his family are going to be in misery for a long, long time. 🙁

Something about this bothers me. According to Snowden, he discovered this years ago, but said nothing because he thought Obama would end the program. But then he waits until Obama is safely reelected (releasing this a year ago would have guaranteed this program would have come to an end) and then runs off to China for safety(!?!). Now everyone is talking about a domestic spying program that Democrats can alternately say “Bush did it too!” and “See, we’re tough on terrorism!” Not many people are still talking about the Administration using the tax agency to depress and discourage their political enemies.

Interesting phrase, “Hoovering up”…

O’l J. Edgar was quite the one for having his minions collect all the nasty bits and using them to strong-arm people.

Hoover never collected this much data! I’m not a gun person, but I do read the blog at western rifle shooters. For the pictures and stuff. Anyway, excellent piece on using connection diagrams to pinpoint who the insurgents are. Without ever listening to the actual conversations.

Their example was how easy it would be to find Paul Revere by just knowing who was talking to who back in 1775. http://westernrifleshooters.wordpress.com/2013/06/11/using-metadata-to-find-paul-revere/

Well…I’ll never go into politics. Last thing I need thrown at me in public is my interests as far as porn goes.

Hoovering refers more to this than J. Edgar, AFAIK.

What was that funny line Iowahawk had? Nothing says reverence for our legacy of Constitutionally guarded liberty like defecting to the People’s Republic of China.

Oh, this Snowden guy is shady as fuck. I’m not really interested in his resume, I’m interested in the NSA. And they’ve pretty much admitted they’re sucking down everyone’s metadata, haven’t they?

The cellular phone “metadata” (meaning “data about data”) is more properly referred to as “billing data”, since that’s what the carriers use it for. Mostly.

Google/Facebook et al – don’t know what they call it, other than “Ha! SUCKERS!”

“We didn’t give (your friends at) the NSA the actual text(s) of your search(es), but we did tell them how many* were about something beginning with “p” & ending with “orn”.”

* Srsly, you keep jerkin it like 15 times a day, it’s gonna fall off.