NSA Collects 200M Texts A Day

I want to work for the NSA, if only to read my old texts.
 
Just 2300 a second? I swear that barely keeps up with my daughters texting rates.

(in all seriousness. OVER 14000 in one month. GOOD LORD! )
 
globally that doesn't amount to very much.

I feel like too many journalists are profiting from anything "NSA is evil" related articles.
 
Darunion said:
globally that doesn't amount to very much.

I feel like too many journalists are profiting from anything "NSA is evil" related articles.
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Its the new "big thing" to report on. And just like past "big things" will eventually be trumped by something else that is more interesting/controversial and they will move on to that.
 
What I would be curious at seeing are the filtering & profile building algorithms they must use to make profiles of everyone behind those texts!
 
Yakk said:
What I would be curious at seeing are the filtering & profile building algorithms they must use to make profiles of everyone behind those texts!
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I fully agree. That would be very interesting to know, but of course if that went public then what they are looking for will change their methods :/
 
We should write an Android/iOS app that texts predetermined contacts at regular intervals:

"Suck a hogs ass you spying bastards"

I have about 100 contacts, text each once per minute.
 
Naa, they just need to database the meta data for network and pattern analysis. The same phones making calls are sending/receiving texts.

General texts wife.
Company CEO texts banker.
Drug Dealer texts warlord.
Manufacturer of electronics texts some government slop in procurement.
College professor texts Mosque.
Low level Indian diplomat texts slave bitch at the house.
Emelda Marcos orders new shoes.

Whatever, it's all over the world all the time. But it's not about some sort of algorithm that reads the contents of a text message and says, "This is a approximately 23 year old male tech support specialist from New Delhi." It's about the General who sells a few missiles to a warlord in who's in business with a drug dealer and his banker is so and so and he always takes his wife on trips out of the country and she always buys new shoes while they are out, blah blah blah, oh, and every time he goes thru France and his wife goes shoe shopping, he always calls this one guy, who's he?
 
Any headline about the NSA should read, "The NSA, and it's private contractors ".

According to the offices of James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, of the 4.9 million people with clearance to access "confidential and secret" government information, 1.1 million, or 21 per cent, work for outside contractors—these intelligence corporations.

Of the 1.4 million who have the higher "top secret" access, 483,000, or 34 percent, work for contractors—meaning that, as Edward Snowden recently revealed in his interview with the Guardian's Glenn Greenwald, contractors sitting anywhere, in a home office for example, have vast access to the personal communications of ordinary citizens.

Snowden, who worked for intelligence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton Holding Corp, states:


Any analyst at any time can target anyone, any selector anywhere. Where those communications will be picked up depends on the range of the sensor networks and the authorities that that analyst is empowered with. Not all analysts have the ability to target everything. But I, sitting at my desk, certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant to a federal judge, to even the president, if I had a personal email.

"It's very difficult to know what contractors are doing and what they are billing for the work – or even whether they should be performing the work at all," said Scott Amey, an expert in contractor oversight and government transparency at Project on Government Oversight, a non-partisan government accountability organization based in Washington. "It has muddied the waters."

Speaking on Democracy Now! Glenn Greenwald explained on Monday, "the systems at NSA allow full and unfettered access at any time to any one of these analysts to go and listen to whatever it is they want, to read whatever emails they want, to monitor in real time whatever online chats are taking place."

"And because there’s no oversight, because there’s really no accountability or transparency, there is no check on this abuse."

https://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/06/11-1
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The Digital Blackwater business model is more profitable than armed conflict ever was, it's a self sustaining ice cream cone that licks itself. And private contractors are not subject to FOIA requests so they're the perfect place to keep the public in the dark, or commit fraud.

You can believe that the people who hold your data are shining knights and the data the NSA holds is secure, but that's proven to be a fantasy. Snowden was only an employee at Booz Allen Hamilton 3 months before disclosing some of the nation's most guarded secrets.

It's a money making machine covered with a black canvas, that even congress can't get a handle on. It's a syndicate.
 
I wonder if you could see if you were in the information collected or on the watch list or whatever through the freedom of information act? I know you could see if you had an FBI file using it, but not sure with NSA. I know they don't really do that kind of stuff and they work for other agencies. But, just to see if they have your data.
 
hey don't worry,,, obonga is doing this to protect you !! You don't mind if they are tracking / reading your emails/texts because its making you feel sooooooo much safer. We should all just be chipping in and CC'ing the NSA on every email and text we send anyways.
 
One of the many reasons to avoid SMS and use more secure methods of communication...
 
tazeat said:
One of the many reasons to avoid SMS and use more secure methods of communication...
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recent reports have shown that there is no such thing as secure communication if there are backdoors in encryption, communication is intercepted before encryption or after decryption, your phone can be hacked easier than cheese or you are just routed through nsa infrastructure (for example if they deploy a cell phone base station that is way stronger than a regular one so that phones automatically connect to that one). there is a presentation by mr appelbaum on the ccc congress that i find jaw dropping.

the only secure method would be to meet in person in an abandoned mine shaft or something.
 
Look at how badly the Nixon administration has been demonized by the media for 40+ years over one phone tap, yet they still worship Obama despite 200 million texts tapped into everyday. Obama is a billion times worse than Nixon.
 
longblock454 said:
We should write an Android/iOS app that texts predetermined contacts at regular intervals:

"Suck a hogs ass you spying bastards"

I have about 100 contacts, text each once per minute.
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That would be a wasted effort because it's pissing into the ocean compared to even just one high school, and the Chinese wouldn't get the joke anyway.
 
evilsofa said:
That would be a wasted effort because it's pissing into the ocean compared to even just one high school, and the Chinese wouldn't get the joke anyway.
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Yeah but who doesn't want to say "Choke on a bag of wieners you jackstain pencil dick losers"?

All we need to do is get azrienoch out of hiding, a quick feature on XDA and we'd have millions texting millions per min 24-7.
 
longblock454 said:
Yeah but who doesn't want to say "Choke on a bag of wieners you jackstain pencil dick losers"?

All we need to do is get azrienoch out of hiding, a quick feature on XDA and we'd have millions texting millions per min 24-7.
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So you want to attempt (and probably fail) to DDOS the American text messaging system in order to... do what exactly? The NSA isn't reading the 40 billion text messages that Americans make each day. I'm not making that number up; Americans send about 2 trillion text messages per month now.
 
so just for some context....

verizon is the largest wireless carrier in the US with 35-40% of US subscribers. verizon customers send about 780 billion texts per year (as of 2012) as per here, which is about 2.1 billion texts per day.

and that is only one company, and numbers from 2 years ago. 10-50 billion total texts sent per day over US networks wouldnt be hard to imagine in 2014. probably getting near 100 billion globally, daily.

and the NSA is capturing a /mere/ 200 million, from across the whole globe? sounds like a drop in the bucket. who knows if those numbers are accurate or what they are doing today, though, and where. of all the nefarious things they have been caught doing, this seems like the least of it.

no one thought SMS was secure for some time, anyway. anyone with a few hundred bucks and some technical skills can build a device that captures all sms traffic in the local area, as was demonstrated half a decade ago at a blackhat conference.

its just that the NSA lied so much, we just have to question every single thing now, even the **relatively** less serious programs.
 
The Psi-Ops continues.

Yes, now they meant CONTENT all along. Next week it will be, oh yah, we told you we recorded your phone conversations. And 2 months from now when you accuse them of months of covering up and lying about content, they will accuse you of being CRAZY. Of course we recorded all of it, we told you that, you are nutz, we never lied. :cool:

That database of CONTENT, all the texts, phone conversations, and emails ...

MUST BE DESTROYED

It is a threat to not just our privacy as citizens, but our very humanity. :eek::rolleyes:
 
evilsofa said:
So you want to attempt (and probably fail) to DDOS the American text messaging system in order to... do what exactly? The NSA isn't reading the 40 billion text messages that Americans make each day. I'm not making that number up; Americans send about 2 trillion text messages per month now.
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Let's pretend they're incapable of filtering.

Just the thought of every 3rd message they read saying "Suck a hogs ass", brings a smile. Just sneaking it in every now and then, imagine reading that day after day after day.
 
I can't get to the article.

Some please enlighten us. Does the article specifically claim the content is on US Persons or on foreign entities?

Or did they just leave that distinction up to us to select on our own?
 
and the NSA is capturing a /mere/ 200 million, from across the whole globe? sounds like a drop in the bucket.
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Yes Ghost, and that is what I have been trying to get across to people all along. They are not doing what people claim they are doing. The numbers never add up to what the writers of these articles want people to believe is going on.
 
its just that the NSA lied so much,
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This is what I don't get. Statements like this, they lied so much, the lied and lied, on and on.

But they didn't, even if there was just one lie, and I am not sure if there was even one, it's now lied and lied, the NSA lied so much.

Does anyone make the distinction that the DNI lying isn't the NSA lying? In fact, the NSA lying is only true if the NSA did the lying. But people lump it all together, and it's now "lied so much".

Too many youtube videos like that one by the Young Turk where he tries to make the answers of two entirely different questions look like lies about the same question, but they weren't.
 
Just the thought of every 3rd message they read saying "Suck a hogs ass", brings a smile. Just sneaking it in every now and then, imagine reading that day after day after day.
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You need to get a clue mate, or a girl, I always get that quote mixed up :D
 
lcpiper said:
This is what I don't get. Statements like this, they lied so much, the lied and lied, on and on.

But they didn't, even if there was just one lie, and I am not sure if there was even one, it's now lied and lied, the NSA lied so much.

Does anyone make the distinction that the DNI lying isn't the NSA lying? In fact, the NSA lying is only true if the NSA did the lying. But people lump it all together, and it's now "lied so much".

Too many youtube videos like that one by the Young Turk where he tries to make the answers of two entirely different questions look like lies about the same question, but they weren't.
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It's of little consolation to general public if the NSA lies it's ass off, or if the Director of National Intelligence lies his ass off on behalf of the NSA. It's a fucking smoke screen deployed by the government octopus to obscure the truth. And it's been demonstrated that, for the individuals telling those lies on behalf of the NSA, even lying to congress brings no penalty.

Now, on the subject of the lies themselves. Surely you don't dispute that a series of lies, omissions, and half truths have been directed towards congress and the general public? Because it sounds like you're walking that line.
 
longblock454 said:
We should write an Android/iOS app that texts predetermined contacts at regular intervals:

"Suck a hogs ass you spying bastards"

I have about 100 contacts, text each once per minute.
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You're onto something there. We, the people, just need to make it really expensive for them to collect the texts. Expensive in terms of storing and sifting through trillions of "Suck a hogs ass you spying bastards" text messages. Unfortunately, if everyone did this, "unlimited" texting from the carriers would go away real fast.
 
Most people who are use to driving $30,000 cars are impressed with a $100,000 car. Big shock.
 
Now, on the subject of the lies themselves. Surely you don't dispute that a series of lies, omissions, and half truths have been directed towards congress and the general public? Because it sounds like you're walking that line.
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Lith1um, I would not dispute this statement greatly. But at the same time you can't dispute that when you call people who hold positions of great responsibility over matters of serious importance, matters that are secret, that should not be discussed in an open forum, that the discussion is not going to be overly enlightening.

Furthermore, although the media might make it sound like the strict definitions the Intelligence Community uses like intercept, collect, process, store, analyze, etc are just being used to obfuscate the truth the reality is that they are used because they are very serious about exactly what is legal, what is not, and this is precisely because they are in a very serious position of trust and all our privacy, rights, safety, and futures rely upon that trust.

Just the other day a program that was used to penetrate hardened systems, systems not even connected to a network in some cases, was exposed. So many of you completely ignored that the article came straight out and stated this was only used against legitimate targets, not against US Persons. So many of you failed to see that this represented something we should NOT have been told about. It passed right over your heads that this reporter just exposed a secret to the entire world, friends and enemies alike, a method that should not have been exposed. A method that in no way comes close to being relevant to this national issue.

It was no different then exposing the real operational capabilities and vulnerabilities of our newest Naval Warship, that stealth destroyer that was just completed and commissioned. No different.

That report was clearly a truly an illegal act that Press Credentials in no way protect. But we, and apparently the press as well, have become so inured to releasing documents with S E C R E T written on them that they don't even consider anymore what it is they are really doing.

Think this through guys.
 
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