NSA to world+dog: We're only watching 1.6% of internet, honest

OK, that's fine then.

Paedos only rape 0.0001% of children, so that's OK too?

Terrorists only kill 0.001% of people, so is that OK?

Muggers only blight the lives of 0.01% of people, that must be fine.

Seriously NSA, you are meant to be smart. An immoral act is an immoral act, regardless of the number of people it affects.

Outsourcing?

...it “... touches about 1.6%... “ of daily Internet traffic ...

That's OUR systems, of course. Most of the grunt work of monitoring the ENTIRE internet is outsourced...

"Released on Saturday with little fanfare, the document's prologue explains that the NSA lacked tools to track one of the 9/11 hijackers."

Interesting. So they had the ability to track the others?

But they still somehow missed that whole "Let's fly some airliners into big buildings" thing?

I'm feeling very reassured now that whatever they're doing is totally worthwhile.

Ad for new NSA Internet snooping employees

WANTED - for friendly local media company in Washington DC.

Fancy sitting around watching the Internet and reading e-mails for a living? Then, we kid you not, there is a vacancy available at our friendly local company. Apply now! Credit and background checks will be conducted. Applicants must be able to demonstrate a love of cats and pussy in general.

Forget the NSA

The REAL controversy here is finding out El Reg operates on Lotus!

1.6% of all traffic eh?....

...... numbers are fantastic, they can tell you everything. So Mr NSA fella, if I download a 30GB game from Steam, and it takes on 34Kb to tell you about it, what percentage is that?

Playing the system (or breaking it)

Since the NSA are playing silly buggers, why not return the favour.

We need a small piece of software that will create an email with keywords from a suggested list (some but not all of the words) - thus plot, bomb, New York etc.

The same piece of software then needs to adjust a 250kb image of say the president of the USA, make sure the CRC changes, that the image metadate is different, date and time would be current to the program.

It would then take your outlook (maybe other e-mail clients) and mail a slightly different message of different length to each person in your address book.

In turn it should be able to receive such e-mails adjust the content slightly and maybe reply.

Finally we get a load of americans to use this tool for a couple of days, and thereafter on occasion to friends outside the USA.

From an individuals perspective, you get a bit more junk mail that you would normally get in any given day (but its in a good cause!).

From the internets perspective there would be an increase in email volume comprable to a large SPAM campaign, or the release of some topless photos of a famous celeberaty.

From the NSA perspective..........

"Here at Vulture South we write in a word processor (Lotus Symphony)..."

Do you use Lotus Notes too?

Only terrorists???

Nice to know they select 'foreign entities which might be of interest'. With of course terrorists as example. And so it goes on - NSA is fighting the terrorists, for your safety, what's wrong with that? I'll tell you what's wrong. It has already been revealed that the European Community, and especially it's trade policy, is very high on the NSA watch list. Yes, their trade policies could harm "US interests" - their economic interests, that is. Whatever bad you can say about the EC, terrorists they aren't. And that is only one example that has been revealed - who knows who else is on the watch list?

Not much of a comfort if...

...you're competing against US companies for contacts....

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/503224.stm

"Journalist Duncan Campbell has spent much of his life investigating Echelon. In a report commissioned by the European Parliament he produced evidence that the NSA snooped on phone calls from a French firm bidding for a contract in Brazil. They passed the information on to an American competitor, which won the contract. There's no safeguards, no remedies, " he said, "There's nowhere you can go to say that they've been snooping on your international communications. Its a totally lawless world."

Goose and gander?

The "NSA joke" is done by using different (self-contained) fonts for parts of the document (show up if you use acroread to convert it to Postscript) and then using character codes that only make sense visually with these glyphs

This stops you cut&pasting sensible text.

Presumably it also stops things like Google indexing it as expected.

So if you don't want the NSA to snoop on messages you send. perhaps you should take a leaf out of their books and send everything as PDF using substituted fonts? [Unless they've got a system for handling that anyway, of course...]

What's not getting much coverage (and needs to)

The NSA is currently building a data storage centre in Utah for storage.

not Petabytes, nor Exabytes or even Zettabytes - indications are that they're aiming at YOTTABYES of storage.

That's more data than has so far been generated by the entire human race through recorded history.

IE: they want to sneeop every single byte passing their snoop points and keep it effectively forever.

Thiunk of all those selfies you'd prefer the world not see. Too late.

NSA budget is roughly 3.6 Billion a year and they only touch 1.6 percent of the net?

<Doctor Evil Voice On>

Riiiiiggggghhhhhhtttttt........

"The reassurances of the NSA document"...

"are addressed entirely to the American people. It simply disregards the human right to privacy of the rest of the world"...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-23669003