USA / NSA Prism program taps in to user data of Apple Google

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This is an important current event but it doesn't seem to me that many people are talking about it here.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/ju ... s-nsa-data

Consider that everything we say on the internet is being monitored by our fascist governments.

Yes, I've been checking on here for almost two days now as the news/scoops have been breaking at The Guardian, and tracking the follow-ups on other sites, ( The Independent, Salon, Truthdig, Alternet, Mother Jones, Boing Boing and other blogs etc ... nothing at Tom Dispatch yet though ) and have been surprised not to see frantic excited heated intense and detailed discussions going on on here about it ( not even in PPR! ) .

The latest stuff about Boundless something or other is pretty cool, about how many millions of bits of data have been collected from US citizens alone in the month of March this year, precise figures for the USA, and various other countries on a day by day basis! ... this despite the NSA telling the Congress Oversight Committee earlier this year that they had no idea how much data had been collected!! ! :lol

"Boundless Informant" ... :lol :

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/ju ... datamining
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Last edited by ouinon on 08 Jun 2013, 5:32 pm, edited 1 time in total.

PS. This is also quite a good update/catch-up summary from UK perspective: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree ... rveillance

Last edited by ouinon on 08 Jun 2013, 5:33 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Nobody wants to talk about it because there is no way to stop it, thats what I think.

Like the too-big-to-prosecute-banks, the 1% owning more than half the world's wealth, the giant-corporate-tax-dodgers, the lies that politicians and CEO's tell constantly and routinely, the drones killing hundreds of innocents in the Middle-East/Asia, the people held for years at Guanto without charges, etc, you mean?

You might be ( depressingly ) correct.
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Last edited by ouinon on 09 Jun 2013, 1:23 am, edited 1 time in total.

What does PRISM stand for. I have not been able to locate that acronym using Google.

ruveyn

they are monitoring and recording EVERYTHING

there are literally files on tens of millions of Americans

Other possible reasons:

1 ) We're simply not surprised. We "knew" it all along. It's been "obvious". An awful lot of people already assumed that this was happening. This is how the world works now, and politicians almost always lie so ( previous ) denials meant nothing anyway. This "scoop" is merely confirmation, nothing to get excited about.

2 ) And also perhaps it simply isn't anything to get upset about, ( unlike drones killing hundreds of innocent men, women and children ) ... after all, isn't this the direction we've been going in for a while, exponentially increasing connectivity of data and people ( like molecules in a cell, or cells in a body ) across the globe en route for the planetary equivalent of a central nervous system?

Yes, the data may be used to stomp on/abuse/oppress/track people whose alleged "terrorism" consists of peaceful environmental activism, or whistleblowing, or making their protesting presence felt at Corporate junkets, etc etc etc ( ... and perhaps being gay or lesbian or homeschooling or wanting a homebirth or having an abortion ... or x, y, z if/whenever a govt comes to power who wants to stamp those things out ... ) ... but didn't that already happen anyway, most of the time/through out history, to people standing up to/against those in power?

The secrecy, the underhand way in which it has been carried out is repellent, distasteful, but normal; politicians and CEO's have been telling lies, lying and lying and lying and lying for so long now it's a surprise, almost disorientating, when they don't. We've become used to, increasingly adept/skilled at navigating a path through lies ... though it's emotionally exhausting and alienating, ... perhaps that's why they do it so much ... it "turns off" sustained/serious political engagement in the most potentially dangerous to the status-quo members of the population ( the truly honest ) ?

I wonder whether the earliest complex protein molecules experiencing incorporation into the structure called a cell, or early/slightly specialised cells "living"/replicating/reproducing in increasingly complex and long-term/permanent "clusters/groups" in the swamps/oceans felt anything biochemically resembling rage or excitement or indignation or shock or fear or resignation when the first proto/pseudo-central nervous systems began "gathering data" from all of them, etc, or reached a new stage of astonishingly efficient data-collection. Maybe to the various discrete elements/contents of a single cell DNA or RNA feels like a rapacious authoritarian power; maybe our cells experience the central nervous systems of our gastrointestinal system and brain as intolerably invasive intolerably omniscient, omnipresent omnipotent forces? ? ? Or maybe they get enough out of it to feel generally "satisfied" with the arrangement/relationship. :lol


Don't know. Wiki and Guardian etc describe it as a "codename" so perhaps it's not an acronym ... just written bizarrely in capital letters? Would have to know who actually "made" the software/app/system. Apparently the company Palantir didn't. Perhaps the same lot as programmed "Boundless Informant"? Maybe it's an in-house product?
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German Green party politician Malte Spitz decided a year or so ago to see how much it was possible to find out about his life only from his mobile/portable phone data, *not* the contents of his calls or emails etc, but simply the "metadata" that Verizon has been shown to be handing over in huge quantities to the NSA in the US. He had to *sue*/take to court his telephone-internet provider to get the data, ( minus the info about the people his calls and emails went to of course, unlike the NSA which gets access to all of that too ) and then he made an interactive app with it, which the German newspaper Zeit published here, and people can look at to see what he got up to over 6 months ... it's amazing/shocking how much detail there is, when you zoom in on the map to the town streets he walked and drove along. And because his phone was set to automatically check for emails every 10 minutes, ( as many are ) the data was almost in real time.

http://www.zeit.de/datenschutz/malte-sp ... -retention
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A huge data-collating center has been built in the Utah desert.

Salt Lake Tribune

They how can useful data be extracted from such a mess? Collecting -everything- runs a close second to collecting -nothing-.

The main hazard I see is that it can be used in political skullduggery. But for "little people" it is hardly a danger since "little people" have nothing and do nothing that those in power are interested in.

ruveyn

I read that the NSA apparently have highly sophisticated software programmes, with algorithms, pattern recognition etc, which look not only for keywords, but also links/connections, repeated actions/names/locations etc, and can put together profiles with varying degrees of probable validity, etc, even more powerful than the systems used by commerce/corporations for analysing markets, product-take-up, consumer behaviour etc, maybe also using similar programs to that of google, for search and selection/filtering etc. I wonder what China's equivalent to the NSA is like.

"Baby" AI's/"brains" growing up on data fed to them in huge quantities just like real baby's brains get ...
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I think you also need to consider that information stored now could be examined retrospectively.

Compare this potential situation with criminal cold cases now, that have been solved because DNA evidence was collected but suitable techniques were not available at the time.

there's duckduckgo.com

doesn't track
doesn't profile

Are you trying to say that this is a good thing? If so the terrorists have won.

No I do not but I'm not surprised in any way.

My quoted post was a reply to Ruveyn and the discussion regarding the point of 'everything being recorded' but Ouinon replied first.