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abdulrahmanabdo

How the NSA's Domestic Spying Program Works | Electronic Frontier Foundation - 0 views

www.eff.org/...how-it-works

NSAspyingprogram

shared by abdulrahmanabdo on 05 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • When the NSA’s spying program was first exposed by the New York Times in 2005, President Bush admitted to a small aspect of the program—what the administration labeled the “Terrorist Surveillance Program”—in which the NSA monitored, without warrants, the communications of between 500-1000 people inside the US with suspected connections to Al Qaeda.
    • abdulrahmanabdo
      abdulrahmanabdo on 05 Jul 14
       
      The first time the NSA's spying programs where first exposed and what was chosen to be revealed by the Bush administration.
  • But other aspects of the Program were aimed not just at targeted individuals, but perhaps millions of innocent Americans never suspected of a crime.
  • A person familiar with the matter told USA Today that the agency's goal was "to create a database of every call ever made" within the nation's borders. All of this was done without a warrant or any judicial oversight.
    • abdulrahmanabdo
      abdulrahmanabdo on 05 Jul 14
       
      The main reason why some Americans are upset by the NSA's recent actions. It was a breach in the balance of power that much of American government is run by, for now hundreds of years.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • This equipment gave the NSA unfettered access to large streams of domestic and international communications in real time—what amounted to at least 1.7 billion emails a day, according to the Washington Post.
    • abdulrahmanabdo
      abdulrahmanabdo on 05 Jul 14
       
      The intelligence gathering power of the NSA.
  • First, the government convinced the major telecommunications companies in the US, including AT&T, MCI, and Sprint, to hand over the “call-detail records” of their customers. According to an investigation by USA Today, this included “customers' names, street addresses, and other personal information.” In addition, the government received “detailed records of calls they made—across town or across the country—to family members, co-workers, business contacts and others.”
    • abdulrahmanabdo
      abdulrahmanabdo on 05 Jul 14
       
      How the intensive intelligence gathering began for the NSA.
  • It works like this: when you send an email or otherwise use the internet, the data travels from your computer, through telecommunication companies' wires and fiber optics networks, to your intended recipient. To intercept these communications, the government installed devices known as “fiber-optic splitters” in many of the main telecommunication junction points in the United States (like the AT&T facility in San Francisco). These splitters make exact copies of the data passing through them: then, one stream is directed to the government, while the other stream is directed to the intended recipients.
    • abdulrahmanabdo
      abdulrahmanabdo on 05 Jul 14
       
      How intelligence gathering works for the NSA.
  • In April 2012, long-time national security author James Bamford reported NSA is spending $2 billion to construct a data center in a remote part of Utah to house the information it has been collecting for the past decade. “Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases,” Bamford wrote, “will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital ‘pocket litter.’
  • abdulrahmanabdo on 05 Jul 14
     
    The NSA's Domestic Spying Program and how it works.
gerellmalazarte

Facebook draws fire from privacy advocates over ad changes - The Washington Post - 1 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...-unprecedented-data-collection

facebook privacy changes

shared by gerellmalazarte on 25 Jun 14 - Cached
  • Facebook came under fire Thursday from privacy advocates who say that changes to its ad network mark an unprecedented expansion of its ability to collect users' personal data.
  • Facebook, of course, is no stranger to privacy criticism. In 2011, the company settled charges with the FTC over changes to its privacy policy
  • In its announcement Thursday, the company said that it will follow competitors in joining the Digital Advertising Alliance and adopting that organization's central tools to let users opt out of data collection for ads.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • "It's true that everybody is doing all of this, and that's how the system works," Chester said. "But this is unprecedented. Given Facebook's scale, this is a dramatic expansion of its spying on users."
  • He said that Facebook, in particular, has become skilled at reading what people understand about online privacy and figuring out how to gradually expand its data collection efforts in ways that will tamp down criticism.
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