NSA Harvests Facebook, Google, Apple User Data, Secret Files Claim

[Nikolaz72]

The guy who did the leak is here. For those early birds that can't wait for the news-story.

 

[oktalist]

FIrst of, its The Guardian. And while its heaps above Daily Mail and other scum, it is still a tabloid. So its source reliability is very questionable.

LOLWUT. The Guardian is not a tabloid.

 

[oktalist]

If you really care about the rights enshrined in the US Constitution, you should wish for those rights to be extended to all persons, not just your own citizens.

This is the point that Gene Roddenberry made in 1968 when Captain Kirk said "They must apply to everyone or they mean nothing!" in TOS: The Omega Glory [http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/The_Omega_Glory_%28episode%29].

 

[Hero in a half shell]

It lists images and videos as things they collect. Can you imagine just how huge their storage is going to have to be? And if this stuff needs to be readily accessible at any time, that just makes it worse. I can imagine huge skyscraper-spanning server farms full of every kind of weird porn on the internet.

Almost right, it's thousands of huge servers, maybe even thousands of huge server farms in the Nevada desert. I read an article, I think it was either in Discovery or Time magazine, and the US military are spending billions of dollars on these facilities with the goal to be able to store and search through everything uploaded onto the internet in real time, flagging the bits they're concerned with.
The scary bit is that according to the article the hard part wasn't storing the information, they're already paid for and installed that infrastructure. No. The bit they haven't succeeded in yet was being able to write code smart enough to be able to search through all the text, pictures, videos etc. and be able to work out whether references to key words or whatever were harmless or needed attention.

Here's a similar article I found from Wired.com: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/

I'm not sure if it's exactly the same thing, but it's close. I've probably got a few flags raised just searching Google for that crap. Oh well, I hope they like reading ranty posts about EA and the Xbox One.

 

[Killclaw Kilrathi]

Almost right, it's thousands of huge servers, maybe even thousands of huge server farms in the Nevada desert. I read an article, I think it was either in Discovery or Time magazine, and the US military are spending billions of dollars on these facilities with the goal to be able to store and search through everything uploaded onto the internet in real time, flagging the bits they're concerned with.
The scary bit is that according to the article the hard part wasn't storing the information, they're already paid for and installed that infrastructure. No. The bit they haven't succeeded in yet was being able to write code smart enough to be able to search through all the text, pictures, videos etc. and be able to work out whether references to key words or whatever were harmless or needed attention.

Here's a similar article I found from Wired.com: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/

I'm not sure if it's exactly the same thing, but it's close. I've probably got a few flags raised just searching Google for that crap. Oh well, I hope they like reading ranty posts about EA and the Xbox One.

Amazing, isn't it? Trillions of dollars in debt and this is what the US government spends its money on. How much money is going to be wasted on such a facility, in the end? And for what, the ability to monitor everyone's internet usage? Every ounce of my IT training tells me that this project can't even work, there's just too much data involved for total internet coverage, and it's constantly expanding to boot. Even if it worked, the extra traffic this site would generate trying to duplicate everything would be a MASSIVE drain on the US telecommunications infrastructure, consumers would be lucky if the best available connection in the country could net them anything over dialup speeds.

I just caught myself thinking that the big media industries wouldn't stand for a drastic drop to their internet services, then I caught myself and remembered that they're the very people who had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the online age, they probably couldn't wait to see everyone have to buy overpriced DVDs and boxed games from brick and mortar shops again.

At best this is all just going to wind up totally unviable and be a ridiculous waste of taxpayer's money. At worst they might actually complete the project first, at which point the cost will be much higher and it will wreak havoc on national telco services. I'm suddenly a lot more forgiving to my own Australian government's attempt at a net filter, it was a stupid and costly plan but at least it wasn't completely deranged as well.