Spy Agency Mined Vast Data Trove, Officials Report

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/24/politics/24spy.html?hp&ex=1135400400&en=efaa31928aa6c87b&ei=5094&partner=homepage

WASHINGTON, Dec. 23 - The National Security Agency has traced and analyzed large volumes of telephone and Internet communications flowing into and out of the United States as part of the eavesdropping program that President Bush approved after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to hunt for evidence of terrorist activity, according to current and former government officials.

The volume of information harvested from telecommunication data and voice networks, without court-approved warrants, is much larger than the White House has acknowledged, the officials said. It was collected by tapping directly into some of the American telecommunication system's main arteries, they said.

more at link
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So they've been sitting on main backbone switches with the help of MCI, AT&T, and Sprint. Question: if a DU member in Europe makes a connection to DU's servers, does the NSA feel its within its rights to look at ALL DU traffic thereafter, since it was involved in the international transaction first? This doesn't make a bit of sense in the real world, but they seem to cling to the thinnest of rationales in order to further their malignant goals.

Lotta English-speaking people show up here.

I just used Europe as a hypothetical. I was wondering if through their twisted logic, they'd think it was permissible to log all DU traffic because the DU servers are connected to national and international clients.

And the larger question is, how can we trust the information thats being fed from publications like the New York Times, that witheld information on the Bush Administration spying only until it was going to be exposed by a newly released book?

...has also been responsible for several of the widespread network outages over the past several years. They present a fairly unique bottleneck in the system. A distributed denial of service attack against the exchange point blocks is absolutely crippling with minimal effort, specifically because of these caching/snooping systems sitting on the backbones.

i mean, think about it -- all the telcos and intel crap in the dc suburbs. what were the deals that went down? what horses have been traded?

Zilch, zero, nada. So that tells me that they weren't spying on terrorists at all. These incompetent, vindictive idiots--they could have at least caught a few hapless terror suspects to cover their tracks. They are so arrogant, they didn't even bother. That's how stupid they believe the American people are--and I'm embarrassed to say they are correct.

a suspect, disapper him, torture or torment him, deny defense, scare the family into not reporting him missing.

When you operate above the law, there are no answers. That is part of what they mean when they say they are going to change our reality.

It's like Skull & Bones. You say it's not honorable, I say it is. Neither is right because it is SECRET. ( I really don't say it is honorable).

How many ways are they hypocritical? We cannot count the ways. They DO NOT respect US or the U.S. or any other humans on this earth. We are to be manipulated, stolen from, lied to, deceived, deluded, and laughed at for our grand gullibility. They probably even laugh at their have-mores and those blind-sided born-agains and their reverends. Why would they respect their voting base - they are using them.

Look, once you've said you aren't going to subject yourself to any oversight what so ever then its clear that there are absolutly no rules as to who you will listen in on.

It won't matter who, it won't matter what the subject was, it will not matter where the call was initiated, terminated, or was routed through. It won't matter if the subject was criminal, political, or terror related. There simply will be no rules against anything.

And that is the state we have been in. There is absolutly no reason on earth to suspect anything less than the very worse you can immagine - because it could be even worse than that.

we continue to be in it because he said he is going to continue doing it.
That's another reason the investigation into it should come before Alito's confirmation. The snooping has to be stopped asap.

anyone can visit this site and read posts

...what's public is coming here and viewing posts, but they monitored the exchange point blocks and stripped the IP packets in transit. They determined the source and the destination, and data mined the contents. That's every financial transaction you've done online. That's every page you've visited, every POST and GET you've pushed thru the pipe. It's the difference between "in plain sight" search and seizure and having evidence thrown out in court. So that's not just the posts, it's also the "Private Messages" DUers send to one another. Snooped on without getting a warrant and requesting the information of Skinner. Don't minimalize this shit by trying to confuse the issue.

If I stand on a street corner and scream, "I've got a bomb" that's a WHOLE DIFFERENT MATTER than if I download a document from some Norwegian website on how to make a bomb. But the government is using the same flawed logic to act against both instances. Padilla "had plans on how to make a bomb". And how did they know that? What have YOU downloaded, viewed, or accidentally had pop-up on your machine that might get you classified as an "enemy combatant"? And what about the potential for BushCo to hand out intel to friends and family on business competitors? Because you damn well know that they have.

...the meaning of the article quoted by the OP. This isn't just a bunch of guys sitting in a room, jotting down notes on our posts here at DU. It's the caching and data mining of all data crossing the exchange point blocks. It creates a highly vulnerable bottleneck in the electronic communications infrastructure, and it's f'n unconstitutional police state shit. The hostility, and anger, are over what they are doing. Are you telling me you DON'T have a problem with that? Read some of the other posts on this matter, and the explanations of the software being used. This isn't them just peeking at websites and popping in for visits to the local mosque.

I was not refering to the technical stuff in my post

right? I mean, that's why they needed all this covert, illegal spying.

From Salon's article today about James Bamford:

Bamford still likes to quote Sen. Frank Church of Idaho, who warned in 1975 of the vast powers of NSA's signal intelligence operation. "That capability at any time could be turned around on the American people and no American would have any privacy left, such the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversation, telegrams, it doesn't matter," Church declared then. "There would be no place to hide."

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/12/23/bamford/index.html