US chief spook: Look, we only want to spy on 6.66 billion of you

Never miss an opportunity to casually insult Merkin spooks when chatting general bollox on teh interwebs. Paranoid wankers, the loddofem.

My default assumption is that all comms are being monitored all the time, either on "public order" or "national security" grounds. As if a judge is going to say no to the plod or security services when they ask for a tap warrant.

They don't get appointed if they don't toe the line.

Given the driftnet nature of badly written law, which inevitably gets abused for purposes of political advantage, if your name bobs to the surface due to clerical incompetence (see any report on police IT skills) or pisspoor intelligence gathering, you're well and truly fucked. The more politically motivated halfwits you give access to huge piles of data and smart mining tools, the more false positives you'll get.

You don't find a needle in a haystack...

... by making the haystack bigger...

RRRRRIIIIIIIGGGGGHHHHHTTTTTT....

A bunch of cloud computing IT specialist debating privacy rights. I've heard it all now.

Mr. Clapper, nobody is saying that what you are doing is illegal

What we are saying is that it A) isn't right and B) should probably be illegal.

Clapper says this; Clapper says that. Clapper says things that may be true. Or not.

These people need to be dragged onto the kerb and be summarily dealt with.

Obama’s “Dirty Wars” — and a soiled presidency

One eerie episode in “Dirty Wars” that hit me especially hard amid this week’s headlines is set not in Yemen or Afghanistan or Scahill’s especially terrifying journey to Somalia (you need “kidnap and ransom insurance,” and it’s not easy to get) but in the Senate Office Building in Washington. He interviews Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., a strong critic of the Bush-Obama national security state and almost the only member of the Senate Intelligence Committee who’s ever willing to talk about these issues on the record. Wyden clearly wants to explain to Scahill how the Obama administration interprets the laws it uses to conduct national security operations both at home and abroad. But an aide, sitting nearby but off camera, keeps reminding the senator that those legal interpretations are classified, and he can’t talk about them.

“What Wyden was saying to me,” says Scahill, “was that whether it’s the kill program or it’s domestic surveillance or it’s certain secret aspects of the Patriot Act, there are laws that the American people can go online and read, and reasonable people will interpret those in relatively the same way. And then there’s a second set of laws, which consist of the way the administration has interpreted what those laws say. So what he’s saying to me is that on any of these issues, if I could tell you how they’ve interpreted what you believe a law to say, it would shock you.”

Looks like he IS lying

Article says, "According to the director, the US government CANNOT PRISM - which is underpinned by the aforementioned US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act - to harvest data on American citizens."

If he said that, he lied. If he had said, "the US govt MAY not use PRISM" then he'd have been within the weasel boundary. But the capabilities of PRISM as described both by Snowden and the NSA make it quite clear that the setup makes possible harvesting data on any and everybody, as it is all stored. Any claim of self-imposed limits on using only those bits allowed by the FISC (which approves over 99.9% of requests anyway) is too ridiculous to be believed.

One good thing about Obama

The best thing about having Obama in office is that this makes it acceptable among so-called conservatives to actually get upset over domestic spying, torture, and other things that were vigorously defended during the previous administration. So it's not a dead loss. But it's close, when an administration that speaks openly against these things but does little or nothing to stop them is considered the best of the only two options.

As I was saying

How's that cloud thingy working for ya?

Money

Congress could just take the money away and cancel the program or ban it altogether if they had the will power. Something tells me the NSA has dirt on virtually everyone so this would never happen. Another young boy Mr Senator, and about that vote coming up on Frid.....