08.23.13
To the NSA, a Dime (Coin) is 75% the Size of a Basketball Court
Summary: A roundup of some of the latest quantitative lies from the Espionage Department (also known as NSA)
THERE has been a lot that we accumulated about the NSA (in daily links) since the Snowden/Greenwald-led leaks began in early June. This is fantastic because it helps show what I have been writing about for years. No longer is this ‘paranoid’ or ‘conspiratorial’. No longer need I send people links to the proof, it’s all common knowledge now. The corporate press has got to cover it too in order to maintain credibility.
“They say they monitor just 1.6% of Internet traffic when in fact they go through 75% of the Net traffic routed through the US.”One story that stood out showed just how villainously deceptive the NSA executive branch can be. They like to pretend that there are just thousands of violations [3] per year [4] when in fact they are spying on all Americans (hence millions or billions of violations per year). They speak of “56,000 personal emails by Americans” (BBC [1] and other corporate press [2]) when in fact they’re watching and saving perhaps billions of E-mails per day. They say they monitor just 1.6% of Internet traffic when in fact they go through 75% of the Net traffic routed through the US.
As I’ve said elsewhere, based on the NSA’s record, assume everything the NSA says to be a lie until or unless proven otherwise. They’re even lying to the courts [5]. The estimates we find [6] are underestimates, still, as Bill Binney, former NSA staff and famous whistleblower, says around 20 trillion transactions are retained by the NSA with plans to keep it all for around 100 years. That’s what he said last year, so the numbers are much higher now (a new Utah-based datacentre has vast additional capacity).
The chief liar of the NSA is trying a PR approach [7] as Congresspeople grow impatient [8] and dirty tricks are revealed [9], going a long way into the past [10]. It is worth noting that the White House played along [11,12] with the NSA’s lies [13], which makes it complicit. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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NSA illegally collected thousands of emails, US admits
A National Security Agency surveillance system illegally gathered up to 56,000 personal emails by Americans annually, declassified court documents show.
Officials revealed that a judge in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court ruled the programme illegal in 2011.
The communications were between people with no links to terror suspects.
The US government faces mounting criticism over its surveillance operations after the leaks of US whistle-blower Edward Snowden.
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NSA admits slurping thousands of domestic emails with no terror connection
The analysts at the NSA spent years gathering tens of thousands of emails between US citizens in violation of the US constitution, as a component of a single (discontinued) data slurping program, the agency has revealed.
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NSA Illegally Collected Emails of Americans With No Terrorism Links
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The NSA collected thousands of emails from US citizens while misrepresenting its program
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Declassified Docs: NSA Misled Court (And Themselves) About Spying on Americans
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NSA used PRISM to collect more than 200 million internet communications a year as of 2011
According to a declassified order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, as of 2011, the US National Security Agency was “acquiring” more than 250 million “internet communications” each year under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act (FAA) — the statute that allows the NSA to collect the content of internet communications. The order states that the “vast majority” of these communications were obtained from internet service providers under PRISM, and that only nine percent of of the total internet communications acquired by the NSA were part of its “upstream” collection practices, which pull data directly from telecommunications cables.
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NSA and Intelligence Community turn to Tumblr — weird but true
In light of top-secret document leaks that show the U.S. government spied on people, the country’s Director of National Intelligence launches a Tumblr blog for greater transparency.
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Rep. Mike Fitzpatrick Introduces Bill To Smack The NSA In The Wallet For Each Data Collection Violation
Unlike the NSA’s surveillance efforts (zing!), Fitzpatrick’s bill is specifically targeted to problematic wording in the FISA Act, making a few changes to Section 501 subsection (b)(2)(a). Here’s how his proposed changes would alter the current wording. [Additions in bold, strikethru hopefully self-explanatory.]
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Secret Court Faulted NSA for Collecting Domestic Data
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In Salt Lake City for the 2002 Olympics? The NSA may have read your texts
These sources confirmed that, “in some cases, [the NSA] retains the written content of e-mails sent between citizens within the US and also filters domestic phone calls made with Internet technology.” Access to this information is granted at “more than a dozen” major Internet junctions on US soil, rather than sucked up exclusively from undersea or foreign cables.
As described by the paper, telecom companies send the NSA large streams of Internet traffic that are believed “most likely to contain foreign intelligence.” Then, it appears that the NSA decides what to keep from that stream based on both metadata and content of the communication, using “selectors” like e-mail addresses or IP addresses. “In making these decisions, the NSA can look at content of communications as well as information about who is sending the data,” the WSJ writes.
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Caught, White House Reiterates Flat Out Lies About NSA Surveillance
Fresh off of a brand new series of document releases, including several that flat out admit to the NSA violating the US Constitution with its surveillance schemes and collecting broad swathes of data about ordinary Americans’ communications, the White House is quick with another statement.
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White House Denies NSA Domestic Spying
The White House on Wednesday denied that the National Security Agency (NSA) has domestic Internet surveillance program, with its reach even broader than U. S. intelligence whistleblower Edward Snowden has revealed.
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NSA Lies! NEW New Revelations
Well, the National Security Agency has been caught lying through its back teeth now (yet again, perhaps, some might hasten to add). The trouble is that the NSA won’t have any teeth left after the people find out that the supposed surveillance of US citizens’ internet traffic being nothing more than a measly 1.6% of the sites that we visited and the communications sent is just a bare faced lie. It apparently turns out now that it is 75% at least of the sites that are visited by everyone in the country.
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