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Verizon required to give ALL call data to NSA (1 Viewer)

As good a place as any to drop this

Meet Truthy, a government project that will scan Twitter for 'social pollution'


Big Brother is reading your tweets. At least that's what it seems like with an ambitious new project called Truthy, which is partially funded by the U.S. Federal government.

The study is being conducted by researchers from the University of Indiana and backed by the National Science Foundation. The project aims to use data collected from Twitter feeds to determine how misinformation, or so-called "social pollution," is spread through online social media.

The name "Truthy" was inspired by satirical TV talk show host Stephen Colbert. He coined the term during the premiere episode of his show, The Colbert Report, where he defined the word as "truth that wouldn't stand to be held back by facts."


Memes on Twitter, which are being presented as fact even when they are not, are what Truthy monitors.

"We also plan to use Truthy to detect political smears, astroturfing, misinformation, and other social pollution. While the vast majority of memes arise in a perfectly organic manner, driven by the complex mechanisms of life on the Web, some are engineered by the shady machinery of high-profile congressional campaigns. Truthy uses a sophisticated combination of text and data mining, social network analysis, and complex networks models," the researchers explain the project on the offcial website.

The project has already been gaining criticism from writers like Ajit Pai of the Washington Post, who is also a member the Federal Communications Commission.

He writes that the whole concept sounds absolutely Orwellian and emphasizes that the government should not be in the newsroom or poking around the social media habits of private citizens.

"In the United States, the government has no business entering the marketplace of ideas to establish an arbiter of what is false, misleading or a political smear," he points out.

Meanwhile, researchers for the Truthy project are encouraging people to participate in the study by clicking on the Truthy button every time they see a suspicious meme being shared and trending.

http://www.techtimes.com/articles/18258/20141021/meet-truthy-government-project-will-scan-twitter-social-pollution.htm
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Get em Rand!

Libertarian Champion Rand Paul Helped Kill NSA Reform Bill

WASHINGTON -- Rand Paul, a leader of the libertarian wing of the Republican Party, helped kill a bill meant to rein in the National Security Agency. Huh?

The USA Freedom Act, sponsored by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), received 58 votes on Tuesday night -- two short of cloture, the magic number in the Senate that allows a bill to proceed to an actual roll call.

The 40 Republicans and one Democrat who voted against cloture mostly did so because they thought the bill went too far. Paul also voted against NSA reform -- because, he said, it didn't go far enough.


Paul said he voted against the bill because it would have extended the Patriot Act provision that allows the NSA to search Americans’ phone records. He has consistently opposed the Patriot Act, passed in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Leahy’s bill extended the provision’s expiration to June 2017 -- as a compromise, in order to change the law to stop the NSA from holding onto phone records. Under Leahy’s bill, that duty would have been handed off to phone companies. The companies' records could only have been searched with a surveillance court's order.

While Paul said he “felt bad” that the bill failed, because it “probably needed my vote," he also claimed the country was "one step closer to restoring civil liberties," because the Patriot Act provision's expiration date will not be extended.

Paul's bedfellows on the vote to kill NSA reform made doomsaying predictions on the Senate floor, saying the legislation would allow Islamic State terrorists to perpetrate another 9/11.

Leahy pleaded with those who had concerns about the bill to allow it to proceed past Tuesday’s cloture vote and try to fix it through amendments. But Paul ignored him, essentially cutting himself off from the chance to add an amendment. NSA reform’s next stop is May 2015 -- the Patriot Act provision’s original expiration date.

It's unclear what will happen then. Civil libertarians saw the bill as their best chance at reform before a GOP majority led by Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who lashed out Tuesday about the reform bill and the process shepherded by current Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.). McConnell's vote against cloture meant he also lost his chance to amend the bill, even though he has repeatedly complained about Reid closing off the amendment process.

The motives of McConnell and Paul may differ -- but Paul's vote against the reform bill conveniently aligns him with the powerful incoming Senate majority leader.

Before McConnell's primary victory against a tea party challenger, Paul held the cards in the relationship. McConnell was so eager to win Paul's support he went so far as to push hard for an amendment that would legalize hemp production.

Now that McConnell is soon to be majority leader, and his longtime lieutenant Steven Law is president of Crossroads GPS, McConnell holds the cards. Paul, who is leaning toward a 2016 presidential bid, would benefit from the support of Crossroads.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/11/18/rand-paul-nsa-reform-bill_n_6182204.html
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tom22406 said:
Slapdash said:
StrikeS2k said:
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/12/04/nsa-auroragold-hack-cellphones/

:doh:
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Police state only matters in this forum when it is going after blacks.
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:goodposting:

Very interesting dynamic going on here for sure.

Thanks for posting that article Strike,I had no doubts this was already going on and this certainly confirms that for me.
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Also important to note that this information came from leaked docs from Snowden. Thus far we have no evidence that anything he leaked has put anyone or any investigation at risk, but we do know that it has shown how far our government is going to spy on us. Yet some in this forum think he's a traitor.

 
NSA Drops Christmas Eve Surprise

The National Security Agency on Christmas Eve day released twelve years of internal oversight reports documenting abusive and improper practices by agency employees. The heavily redacted reports to the President’s Intelligence Oversight Board found that NSA employees repeatedly engaged in unauthorized surveillance of communications by American citizens, failed to follow legal guidelines regarding the retention of private information, and shared data with unauthorized recipients.

While the NSA has come under public pressure for openness since high-profile revelations by whistleblower Edward Snowden, the release of the heavily redacted internal reports at 1:30PM on Christmas Eve demonstrates limits to the agency’s attempts to demonstrate transparency. Releasing bad news right before a holiday weekend, often called a “Christmas Eve surprise,” is a common tactic for trying to minimize press coverage.

The reports, released in response to a Freedom of Information Act request submitted by the American Civil Liberties Union, offer few revelations, but contain accounts of internal behavior embarrassing to the agency. In one instance an NSA employee “searched her spouse’s personal telephone directory without his knowledge to obtain names and telephone numbers for targeting”, a practice which previous reports have indicated was common enough to warrant the name “LOVEINT”.

Many of the reports appear to deal with instances of human error rather than malicious misuse of agency resources. Nonetheless, many of these errors are potentially serious, including entries suggesting that unminimized U.S. telephone numbers were mistakenly disseminated to unauthorized parties and that military personnel were given unauthorized access to raw traffic databases collected under the Foreign Intelligence Services Act.

There are also accounts of simple bumbling by NSA employees, including the apparently common mistake of targeting their own communications for surveillance. In one unintentionally amusing passage, an NSA analyst is said to have “targeted his personal cellphone,” because he “mistakenly thought it would be acceptable to [redacted].” Another common example is the practice of NSA analysts accidentally designating their own communications as being those of a foreign intelligence target.

Even in their redacted form the reports give insight into the level of power individual agency employees have in ordering surveillance, and the intentional and unintentional abuses that can take place in an environment of minimal oversight. Though NSA officials have repeatedly suggested that the agency has rigorous safeguards in place to prevent individual employees from abusing their powers of surveillance, the agency’s own confidential internal reporting appears to contradict this.

“The government conducts sweeping surveillance under this authority -— surveillance that increasingly puts Americans’ data in the hands of the NSA”, Patrick Toomey of the ACLU’s National Security Project said in comments to Bloomberg News. “Despite that fact, this spying is conducted almost entirely in secret and without legislative or judicial oversight.”

 
Slapdash said:
NSA Drops Christmas Eve Surprise

The National Security Agency on Christmas Eve day released twelve years of internal oversight reports documenting abusive and improper practices by agency employees.
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On the 1st year of Christmas, the NSA spied for me...

 
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Gandalf the Grey said:
Equation Group.

I understand very little of the technical stuff in this article but others might find it interesting.

http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/02/how-omnipotent-hackers-tied-to-the-nsa-hid-for-14-years-and-were-found-at-last/
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  • Redirects that sent iPhone users to unique exploit Web pages. In addition, infected machines reporting to Equation Group command servers identified themselves as Macs, an indication that the group successfully compromised both iOS and OS X devices.
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:coffee:

 
SacramentoBob said:
Gandalf the Grey said:
Equation Group.

I understand very little of the technical stuff in this article but others might find it interesting.

http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/02/how-omnipotent-hackers-tied-to-the-nsa-hid-for-14-years-and-were-found-at-last/
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  • Redirects that sent iPhone users to unique exploit Web pages. In addition, infected machines reporting to Equation Group command servers identified themselves as Macs, an indication that the group successfully compromised both iOS and OS X devices.
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:coffee:
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It's never been tough to do....there's just been no reason. This is the tip of the iceberg for Apple especially since they now have created the target called Apple Pay. Hard to resist all those CC numbers just sitting on phones "secured" by a person's password.

 
I haven't read through much of this thread so this has probably already been discussed, but I watched pt. 1 of Frontline: United States of Secrets. Will watch part 2 later tonight.

The complete lack of regard for the Constitution is appalling. And these are the same people who scream for their 2nd amendment rights whenever there's a cry for reasonable gun control. The 4th is every bit as important. And Obama's no better for continuing to let it happen.

 
http://digg.com/2015/why-mass-surveillance-cant-wont-and-never-has-stopped-a-terrorist

Ubiquitous surveillance and data mining are not suitable tools for finding dedicated criminals or terrorists. We taxpayers are wasting billions on mass-surveillance programs, and not getting the security we’ve been promised. More importantly, the money we’re wasting on these ineffective surveillance programs is not being spent on investigation, intelligence, and emergency response: tactics that have been proven to work. The NSA's surveillance efforts have actually made us less secure.
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Speaking of ridiculous government overreach and abuse of power.

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/crime/blog/bs-md-ci-stingray-new-disclosures-20150420-story.html

The device is so secretive that the FBI has required police and prosecutors to sign a document agreeing not to discuss its use, even to judges or legislators.The stingray works by mimicking a cellphone tower and tricking all phones within a range of up to a mile to connect with it. For years, police have referred to it in affidavits using terms such as "sophisticated technology," and if questions arose, the nondisclosure agreement instructed prosecutors to drop cases rather than reveal details about it.
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Really? If that doesn't show that government knew what it was doing was wrong and illegal, I really don't know what does.

 
Top court rules against NSA program

A federal court has decided that the National Security Agency’s (NSA) bulk, warrantless collection of millions of Americans’ phone records is illegal.

The decision from the Second Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday represents the second major court victory for opponents of the NSA, after a lower court decision called the program nearly unconstitutional six months ago.

The phone records program “exceeds the scope of what Congress has authorized,” Judge Gerard Lynch wrote on behalf of the three-judge panel. The court did not examine the constitutionality of the surveillance program.http://thehill.com/policy/technology/241305-top-court-rules-against-nsa-program
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tom22406 said:
Top court rules against NSA program

A federal court has decided that the National Security Agency’s (NSA) bulk, warrantless collection of millions of Americans’ phone records is illegal.

The decision from the Second Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday represents the second major court victory for opponents of the NSA, after a lower court decision called the program nearly unconstitutional six months ago.

The phone records program “exceeds the scope of what Congress has authorized,” Judge Gerard Lynch wrote on behalf of the three-judge panel. The court did not examine the constitutionality of the surveillance program.http://thehill.com/policy/technology/241305-top-court-rules-against-nsa-program
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Not really all that shocking. What will be shocking is if they actually stop the practice. I suspect they will just get better at keeping it from us.

 
The Commish said:
tom22406 said:
Top court rules against NSA program

A federal court has decided that the National Security Agency’s (NSA) bulk, warrantless collection of millions of Americans’ phone records is illegal.

The decision from the Second Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday represents the second major court victory for opponents of the NSA, after a lower court decision called the program nearly unconstitutional six months ago.

The phone records program “exceeds the scope of what Congress has authorized,” Judge Gerard Lynch wrote on behalf of the three-judge panel. The court did not examine the constitutionality of the surveillance program.http://thehill.com/policy/technology/241305-top-court-rules-against-nsa-program
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Not really all that shocking. What will be shocking is if they actually stop the practice. I suspect they will just get better at keeping it from us.
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This should be a topic for the '16 election but probably won't. They'll continue to fight over immigration, abortion, climate change and income inequality. "Stay focused on this while we continue to trample the constitution over here".

 
Last edited by a moderator:
Amused to Death said:
The Commish said:
tom22406 said:
Top court rules against NSA program

A federal court has decided that the National Security Agency’s (NSA) bulk, warrantless collection of millions of Americans’ phone records is illegal.

The decision from the Second Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday represents the second major court victory for opponents of the NSA, after a lower court decision called the program nearly unconstitutional six months ago.

The phone records program “exceeds the scope of what Congress has authorized,” Judge Gerard Lynch wrote on behalf of the three-judge panel. The court did not examine the constitutionality of the surveillance program.http://thehill.com/policy/technology/241305-top-court-rules-against-nsa-program
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Not really all that shocking. What will be shocking is if they actually stop the practice. I suspect they will just get better at keeping it from us.
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This should be a topic for the '16 election but probably won't. They'll continue to fight over immigration, abortion, climate change and income inequality. "Stay focused on this while we continue to trample the constitution over here".
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It's the American way now, isn't it?

 
I'll believe it when I see it. People don't care that the SoS exposed the country the way she did. I doubt they care much about this. Hopefully I'm wrong. We'll see.

 
Other than the collection of bulk data without individual warrants, are there specific aspects of the revised Patriot Act that people here object to?

 
You know Rand Paul is doing something right when he pisses off both sides in this.

At the very least we are getting a little debate going from this even though I have zero doubts the Freedom Act will be passed very shortly.

 
tom22406 said:
You know Rand Paul is doing something right when he pisses off both sides in this.

At the very least we are getting a little debate going from this even though I have zero doubts the Freedom Act will be passed very shortly.
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Why do these bills always have Orwellian names?

 
I don't think the real Jack White would have the avatars we've been seeing out of Jack White Fan imo.

[/hijack]

 
Jack White said:
tom22406 said:
You know Rand Paul is doing something right when he pisses off both sides in this.

At the very least we are getting a little debate going from this even though I have zero doubts the Freedom Act will be passed very shortly.
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Why do these bills always have Orwellian names?
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I doubt the "Violate Your Civil Liberties and Constitutional Rights in Favor of Fear Mongering About the War on Terrorism (but Really Fighting the Drug War) Act" would garner as many votes.

 
whoknew said:
I doubt the "Violate Your Civil Liberties and Constitutional Rights in Favor of Fear Mongering About the War on Terrorism (but Really Fighting the Drug War) Act" would garner as many votes.
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For starters, VYCLACRIFOFMATWOTBRFTDW is a terrible acronym.

 
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