“Candle is Not Worth the Flame”
Please consider NSA Recommends Dropping Phone-Surveillance Program.
The National Security Agency has recommended that the White House abandon a surveillance program that collects information about U.S. phone calls and text messages, saying the logistical and legal burdens of keeping it outweigh its intelligence benefits, according to people familiar with the matter.
The surveillance program began clandestinely—and, at first, without court approval—under the George W. Bush administration in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The NSA operation has sought to collect the metadata of all domestic calls in the U.S. in order to hunt for links among potential associates of terrorism suspects. Metadata include the numbers and time stamps of a call or text message but not the contents of the conversation.
Former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden leaked the existence of the program—along with a tranche of documents exposing other surveillance operations carried out by the NSA—to journalists nearly six years ago. The disclosures ignited an international uproar over the scope of America’s electronic-spying capabilities.
“The candle is not worth the flame,” one former senior intelligence official said about the phone-records program.
Snowden a Hero
I consider Edward Snowden a hero for disclosing the depth and illegalities of all this collection to the world.
Recall that the NSA had even tapped German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s phone.
Big Zero
The NSA defended the data collection as vital.
Many of us laughed at the assertion. I wondered how long it would take for the agency to become so swamped with useless data that it stopped looking at it.
Today, we have the answer.
And the total scorecard for this wasteful, intrusive, and illegal effort has been a big zero. Actually, the program had negative benefits. The time, energy, and money could have been spent on more productive ideas.
Mike “Mish” Shedlock
So we’re supposed to believe the NSA now? Nope.
This doesn’t at all mean mass surveillance will stop. An example from today’s news:
link to courthousenews.com
Other Hopium floating around suggests – yeah, hopes for – all the politician builders and supporters of the criminal Total Blackmail State … got caught up in their own dragnet. The tyranny they built being used against them – horrors! “They never thought she’d lose.”
Some portion of the genpop is hoping that the rule of law is not dead and that there will be trials and nooses. With the NSA providing evidence against their own.
And, remember the first thing the KGB and the STASI did when their empire fell?
NSA Alum William Binney said we have a turnkey totalitarian state. Despite Binney’s VIPS team determining that the DNC was a leak, not a hack, we are still being told otherwise, supposedly even in the Mueller report.
Even if the generals recommendation is followed, a future president can repackage and restart it at some point in the future, for a different purpose.
If you believe the govt quit collecting metadata I have a bridge you will buy from me located on prime real estate in NYC.
The upside is: Telling even Congress critters, the White House, the judiciary and the public that they stopped, shuts off the ability of those to ask for a peek at, or analysis of, collected data; for their own, virtually always arbitrary, nonessential and nonsensical, reasons.
I can feel for the poor chaps; reading the stuff that people produce when they open their mind on the internet must be painful. Leave it to the associates at the Zuckerface agency.
Looks like robocalling has a silver lining. ;o)
Did NSA warn Hillary that Putin was reading her email?
In all likelihood they have a better method of collecting & sorting this data so they can jettison the old program. Either that or Isrealhell is now doing the gruntwork.
Today, we have their answer. Some day soon, we will find out that “getting rid of it mean means selling the data to Mark Zuckerberg. Well, they will get rid of it. Never let a crisis go to waste. Isn’t that how it works here in the Western Nations?
But no layoffs, right?
I always envisioned it as more of an extortion scheme. “Hey John Roberts, if you vote to kill Obamacare we might accidentally leak that you are cheating on your wife and doing drugs off strippers” that sort of thing.
They’re still collecting. With the infrastructure already built and in place, there’s no reason why they wouldn’t. Even without collecting, backbone providers still have to give them access to their infrastructure, since part of their charter is to help protect and coordinate critical communications infrastructure against / during attacks.
By officially no longer collecting the data, they avoid having to respond to whichever privileged idiot, thinks he is entitled to ask about it. And, by appearing less out of control, they’re in a better position to recruit the kind of competent people they need to make sense of large, heterogeneous data sets.
For all the bad press and their horrible reputation, the NSA is, as far as Big Government goes, not really all that bad. They are very much aware that they need to be seen as “not evil,” or they can’t recruit the kind of pointy end of the spear brainiacs they need to do what they do. And, they’re really only chartered to involve themselves in pretty substantial direct threats to the US. Of course, Newspeak being the language of the land, we’re not far from trial lawyers demanding access to data collected for the purpose of providing heads up about imminent nuclear attacks, so they can enrich themselves by sueing people who “threaten national security” by burping sodabubbles; and similarly fashionable drivel.
The reason they will stop collecting is that the volume of data is going up exponentially. So are the sizes of new hard disks. But already installed ones not so much. If you want to track everything you have to keep up with it and that costs money. And when money gets tighter due to tax cuts and interest rate hikes government hacks start to curtail the fatty programs that don’t work. They don’t continue to invest.
Trump administration found out how much they were paying Bezos AWS to store this data, I know that’s tin foil hat but hey its just as possible as the reported story
Nice that NSA is quitting the illegal program, even if it is for the wrong reason. When will Clapper be held responsible for lying to congress about it? People are in jail for similar but much less serious crimes. Obviously the Deep State protects it’s own, just like corrupt Illinois politicians protect themselves.
I had a funny feeling all along that the incompetent maroons working for the guvamint wouldn’t have the foggiest idea what to do with all that data.
Have you not observed that most people are a lot dumber than they look at first glance?
“Think of how stupid the “average” American is. Then realize that half are even dumber than that.” — George Carlin
pretty sure they scanned thru it to look at random naked selfies
NSA Never MetaData it didn’t like. But why bother collecting it when everyone voluntarily gives all their personal data to Tim Cook and Mark Zuckerberg and Google when they click I Agree to the dozens of pages terms and conditions.
Particularly Facebook – We’ll download your contacts, continually track your position, read your email and texts, listen in including to all your phone calls and read your call logs, save the photo metadata…
This is what puzzles me. Why get upset at NSA collecting data, then not care about others collecting even more data? I don’t want NSA collecting my data, but I don’t want Facebook, Google, Apple, and Microsoft collecting it, either.
You don’t have to agree to anything for the giants to track you. Zuckberg and Googs have db records on every man woman child who ever clicked on a web link.
Assume that anything you enter into a computer may fall into the hands of people other than those intended.
I do make it a bit harder for them to track me, at least. I don’t have facebook or twitter accounts, and I block all java from them (and many other sites) regardless of what website the java call came from, plus i purge all cookies regularly. I also use DuckDuck Go for my search engine. I’m not deluded into thinking they have no data on me; I just think they have a bit less than normal.