Building a panopticon: The evolution of the NSA’s XKeyscore by Sean Gallagher.
From the post:
The National Security Agency’s (NSA) apparatus for spying on what passes over the Internet, phone lines, and airways has long been the stuff of legend, with the public catching only brief glimpses into its Leviathan nature. Thanks to the documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, we now have a much bigger picture.
When that picture is combined with federal contract data and other pieces of the public record—as well as information from other whistleblowers and investigators—it’s possible to deduce a great deal about what the NSA has built and what it can do.
We’ve already looked at the NSA’s basic capabilities of collecting, managing, and processing “big data.” But the recently released XKeyscore documents provide a much more complete picture of how the NSA feeds its big data monsters and how it gets “situational awareness” of what’s happening on the Internet. What follows is an analysis of how XKeyscore works and how the NSA’s network surveillance capabilities have evolved over the past decade.
Your mother always tell you as a child that someone was watching over you.
Just change that to “someone is watching you,” and she was right. 😉
It is a good summary of the probable capabilities of the NSA for scooping up packets.
I do find it ironic that the NSA wanted to keep the documents secret always and the Guardian wants to keep some part of them secret until is has mined as many headlines as possible.
I would not be surprised if Snowden/NSA documents are still being leaked in the next presidential election cycle.
Everybody wants to have secrets, just for different reasons.
PS: Is anyone working on a typology for lies? Thought it could be useful when topic mapping the Snowden/NSA documents with presidential documents and post-Obama self-serving testimonials.
Here is a starter list:
- Least untruthful lies
- Damned lies
- Presidential lies
- Ordered lies
- National Security lies
- Accidental lies?
- Necessary lies
- Protect the incompetent lies
- Protect contractor lies
- Protect corruption lies
- What else?