“No actual conversations were recorded or meetings transcribed…”

17 Replies to ““No actual conversations were recorded or meetings transcribed…””

1. Always knew there was something suspicious about Revere riding around at midnight.

2. “We are not Listening to your conversations.”
   “We are not reading your emails.”

3. It’s more like The Midnight Ride of Paul Reveal…

4. yes, ONLY metadata!!!!!! now who was the poster in here that said that, bloody simpleton!!!

5. And still the naive believe the latest revealed NSA/government spying is benign!

6. Yep, “only metadata”
   Right.
   The only good thing is that it’s a bit harder to “disappear” people compared to say, Stalin s time.
   But accidents happen, family members…

7. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/06/08/what_about_a_us_tech_boycott/
   “NSA Prism: Why I’m boycotting US cloud tech – and you should too”
   As always, the comments can be quite interesting as well.

8. Well, it’s a well written article but it presents nothing new. If you didn’t realize how metadata was used, you haven’t been been thinking. Simply put, if it quacks like a duck (metadata) and looks like a duck (metadata), it’s probably a duck. EVERYONE uses metadata. If you see a fine big house with 5 acres on the beach in Malibu you deduce that person is wealthy. And because they live in California, you say with a high probability that they’re probably a liberal Democrat …. you get the point. Metadata analysis has been used by humans since they appeared and has been brought to a fine art by intelligence agencies especially during (and because of) WARS. If you didn’t know that intelligence agencies were already looking for connections based on metadata, you have been naive.

9. Truth is once this technology becomes possible we have no choice but to develop and use it. I don’t blame Google and Microsoft for cooperating. I always relate these advancements to the development of the atom bomb. Once it became known that such a weapon could be built it became a race to be the first to build one and try it out. Fortunately for the world the winner of that race was a civilized and relatively benign country. Unfortunately it appears this new eavesdropping technology is being used to spy on political adversaries and dissident citizens as much as it is on actual people who pose a threat. Sort of like the IRS is being used to bludgeon opponents of the current administration while pretending to be an impartial government entity treating all taxpayers the same. At least Roosevelt didn’t nuke the RNC headquarters.

10. Only 25 years ago the Stasi in the old DDR did just the same, collect mass amounts of information to use against there political enemies.

11. “I always relate these advancements to the development of the atom bomb.” I see it slightly different. This level and magnitude of “connecting the dots” was brought to you by the development of the computer. Specifically, the so called super computers which can perform trillions of calculations in a split second (disclaimer: I don’t know a teraflop from a megaflop). It’s the supercomputers which allow this huge quantity of data to be analyzed in something even close to real time. It’s only going to get faster and more accurate. Every “1st world country” is doing it ….. don’t kid yourselves. Welcome to the world gold fish bowel!

12. It was a freudian slip. Not bowel but “bowl”.

13. No matter how they weasel word it or lie about it – the government spies on civilians without warrant and in ultra vires. – mass unwarranted surveillance is tyranny, NOT in the interests of national security because the cure being offered is far worse than the so called threat.
    Paul Revere, were he alive today, would be warning civilians to take up arms against such open tyranny. This is how our classic liberal forefathers defended the freedom which we give away with our self destructive apathy. The revelations from the US are warning signs that it’s time for citizens to put dangerously intrusive government overreach back in Pandora’s box before things get too dire to fix with the democratic or legal process. The founders of the free-est most democratic nation in human history realized that from time to time even the government they set up would need to be put back into constitutional constraints – so they built in safe guards like court oversight, impeachment, citizen dissolution of congress through consensus and lastly, the 2nd amendment.
    When the cold war ended the US mothballed its redundent nukes, too bad they didn’t mothball the other dangerous cold war weapon, the NSA and its subversive domestic overreach. When a rogue regime deems its criminal actions to be legal and constitutional without the oversight and agreement of congress, they have obliterated any democratic avenue for getting change.
    – Buy today we make jokes about staring into the face of raw organized tyranny – time for a new political acronym – LAC – Low Action Citizen – someone who ignores the historic lessons of constitutional freedom and whose extent of patriotism is reduced to making jokes about government tyrannyl

14. Got to love the plaintive bleating from all corners of the world – “we only look at data on FOREIGN citizens to protect ourselves”. Of course you do – that’s why ECHELON is the greatest you-scratch-my-back-I’ll-scratch-yours scheme ever developed in intelligence circles.

15. I never metadata I didn’t like…

16. Some of you might remember the controversial book Spycatcher written by ex-MI5 man Peter Wright.
    He described the following use of metadata: In 60’s London, the Russians rotated their chief spook, or ‘resident’, frequently. It was always a question when the new man came in as to which of the new attaches he was. To confound the British, the Russians would send out five or six cars simultaneously when the resident went out to meet his contacts, knowing 5 didn’t have the manpower to follow all the cars at once. (If the one with the resident was followed, it simply returned to base after stopping for chips or a newspaper.)
    Wright’s idea was to track the number of radiotelephone calls made from each car. (This was pre-cellular days, of course.) Since these devices were expensive, only the resident would be making calls. Six cars leave, but only one car is transmitting – bingo! Within a few days, the new resident was identified.
    Note that they didn’t need to decode the calls, identify who was calling, or who was called – all they needed was the frequency of calls to determine who they wanted under surveillance.
    Anyone who thinks the metadata is innocuous is an idiot.

17. Oh, by the way, some might remember not-very-funny SNL bit player Al Franken, now a senator from Minnesota. One imagines if Reagan or Bush the Elder had instituted this sort of spying whilst Franken was on TV, he would have had a field day excoriating them for invasion of privacy, snooping on the American people, etc.
    But with Bambam in office, instead we get Al Franken: It’s OK for me to know what bad guys don’t. As Pete Townsend wrote “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss”.