Is the NSA really watching you?
There has been much concern over the recent revelations about the Bush administration allowing the National Security Agency (NSA) to spy on American citizens. Many people seem to be extremely afraid that the government is listening in on their word. Hopefully this information will help shed some light on this:
"[The NSA] does routinely collect vast amounts of data and that it is capable of targeting an individual telephone line or computer terminal on the other side of the planet. But, Hersh cautioned, 'active and retired NSA officials have repeatedly told me that the agency does not have the software to make sense out of more than a tiny fraction of the huge array random communications that are collected'...James Bamford agreed that speculation about the 'NSA being able to eavesdrop everywhere, anytime, everyone is completely not the case.' He broke down the winnowing process...If a single station gathers one million intercepts every half hour, Bamford said all but '6,500 are filtered out through these electronic filters.' Most of that 6,500 still do not meet what the agencies call 'forwarding criteria', so they will be thrown out too, leaving one thousand. 'Out of a million now you're down to about a thousand messages in this half hour. Those are the ones that actually get looked at a little more closely', Bamford explained. 'Sometimes it's just looking at it very quickly to see if it looks interesting, you know, just quickly going through it. Out of a thousand, they normally would get 10 that they find interesting, and out of that ten, there will usually be only one report that will come out."
-- Patrick Radden Keefe, Chatter : Dispatches from the Secret World of Global Eavesdropping, pp. 113-114, 199-200
In other words, the chances of the NSA even wanting to spy on you are very slim indeed.
This does not mean that I endorse what Bush is doing, far from it. I certainly agree with Paul Craig Roberts when he denounces Bush's "criminal administration", although I feel he goes a little over-board in speculating that Bush has blackmailed the Democrats with information obtained by the NSA, hence why they've been putting up such weak and ineffective resistance to his policies. More likely the case of why the Democrats have put up such weak opposition to Bush is because they're incompetent!
The major point I'm trying to make is don't get overly paranoid. This is especially true in the case of Richard M. Smith, who offers some steps one can do to see whether or not "Big Brother" is really spying on you. Long story short: You set up separate e-mail accounts, one on an American server, the other on a foreign server. Then send an e-mail from one to the other and track the people watching it.
Concerning the e-mails you send between the two servers, I especially like the advice Smith gives us: "Send messages between the two accounts which might be interesting to the NSA." I don't know about you, but this sounds like something one would do if they deliberately wanted to attract the attention of the NSA. Not exactly the best advice.
So anyways, I hope I've helped calm some peoples' fears.
"[The NSA] does routinely collect vast amounts of data and that it is capable of targeting an individual telephone line or computer terminal on the other side of the planet. But, Hersh cautioned, 'active and retired NSA officials have repeatedly told me that the agency does not have the software to make sense out of more than a tiny fraction of the huge array random communications that are collected'...James Bamford agreed that speculation about the 'NSA being able to eavesdrop everywhere, anytime, everyone is completely not the case.' He broke down the winnowing process...If a single station gathers one million intercepts every half hour, Bamford said all but '6,500 are filtered out through these electronic filters.' Most of that 6,500 still do not meet what the agencies call 'forwarding criteria', so they will be thrown out too, leaving one thousand. 'Out of a million now you're down to about a thousand messages in this half hour. Those are the ones that actually get looked at a little more closely', Bamford explained. 'Sometimes it's just looking at it very quickly to see if it looks interesting, you know, just quickly going through it. Out of a thousand, they normally would get 10 that they find interesting, and out of that ten, there will usually be only one report that will come out."
-- Patrick Radden Keefe, Chatter : Dispatches from the Secret World of Global Eavesdropping, pp. 113-114, 199-200
In other words, the chances of the NSA even wanting to spy on you are very slim indeed.
This does not mean that I endorse what Bush is doing, far from it. I certainly agree with Paul Craig Roberts when he denounces Bush's "criminal administration", although I feel he goes a little over-board in speculating that Bush has blackmailed the Democrats with information obtained by the NSA, hence why they've been putting up such weak and ineffective resistance to his policies. More likely the case of why the Democrats have put up such weak opposition to Bush is because they're incompetent!
The major point I'm trying to make is don't get overly paranoid. This is especially true in the case of Richard M. Smith, who offers some steps one can do to see whether or not "Big Brother" is really spying on you. Long story short: You set up separate e-mail accounts, one on an American server, the other on a foreign server. Then send an e-mail from one to the other and track the people watching it.
Concerning the e-mails you send between the two servers, I especially like the advice Smith gives us: "Send messages between the two accounts which might be interesting to the NSA." I don't know about you, but this sounds like something one would do if they deliberately wanted to attract the attention of the NSA. Not exactly the best advice.
So anyways, I hope I've helped calm some peoples' fears.
posted by Perun at
5:34 PM
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