I just clicked on link ..... and got ...
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Some what (vaguely) related to this topic
About surveillance.
I recall a local political and business figure making statements you and/or I are being surveilled by the government.
Everyone thought that's not likely , its not possible, he is a bit imbalanced..
After the dumping of documents' from Snowden and Assange it was shown to be possible
Things like, if its even possible , it could plausibly be happening. The government has somewhat infinite resources.
The altered software for hard drive hacking for example. Wow.
Intercepting packages in mail and altering the software ...
I love the internet. For all its drawbacks lately, deep down at its core, there are still hidden gems out there like this website. There goes my afternoon.
We know now that communications are being intercepted in bulk as a matter of intelligence gathering, but that does not equate to everyone being surveilled by the government.
What this actually provides, first and foremost, is the capability to perform targeted surveillance more rapidly, and to do so temporally by reaching into datasets already recorded. Obviously this provides a much-needed capability for legitimate investigations, where the target of interest and their identifying markers may not yet be known.
>We know now that communications are being intercepted in bulk as a matter of intelligence gathering, but that does not equate to everyone being surveilled by the government.
No it doesn't. Think about it. Some computer somewhere that is involved in bulk interception happens to record your browser connecting to, say, the Hacker News website, at various dates and times. This is stored in a dataset. No-one ever views these connection records. No-one ever writes a query for the dataset that returns these connection records. These connection records are automatically deleted after the retention period is up. Clearly, you are not being surveilled.
So your claim is that this massive data collection, done at massive public expense, is not used at all? That seems unlikely. And given how good computers are at natural language processing these days, the data is more usable than ever.
Of course it is used. But unless you're a target of interest to intelligence analysts, the metadata generated by your online activities will be of no interest whatsoever. It won't even be looked at.
The whole point of mass data collection is that you can check everyone to see if they should be targets of interest. And as societies get more totalitarian, what qualifies you to be a target becomes less and less dramatic.
Doing this is easy these days. You keep using phrases like "looked at" as if humans had to manually read through the records.
Analytics are mining the data on here every second. Hacker News is a wildly popular site with higher ups in major Fortune 500 company posting anonymously and publicly here. Say anything bad about a major country's government (or even a minor country like Israel or Palestine) and all kinds of accounts you've never seen before start defending and attacking.
Everything you are saying is being actively monitored at this point on every major website even if you don't believe it's negatively affecting you yet
An analyst who is tasked with investigating, say, terrorist threats, is not going to be remotely interested in the browsing habits of random people who pose no threat whatsoever.
It's just pure paranoia. Yes, we know bulk interception is being done by intelligence agencies. No, they're not watching you. They have more important things to be getting on with.
Your are arguing from a green account that everyone should ignore all evidence contrary to what you are saying and just calling everyone paranoid for not pretending that evidence doesn't exist. The same government that is demanding all visitors to the United States show them all posts they have made online as a condition of entry. It is not an argument worth engaging with anymore.
That supports my point. If there really was a mass surveillance regime as the paranoics claim, there would be no need for the border control agents to ask for social media posts to be shown on entry. They would already have this information.
I see further down the thread you claim that surveillance data is deleted without ever being looked at. Must be why they need a half dozen gargantuan datacenters full of storage and compute.
This is the correct point of reference, but you are misinterpreting it and I urge you to think about it again. All of the government's facilities put together amount to almost nothing in the data center landscape, therefore it should be quite obvious that they certainly are not equipped to broadly intercept, store, and search "everything".
"A former senior U.S. intelligence agent described Alexander's program: "Rather than look for a single needle in the haystack, his approach was, 'Let's collect the whole haystack. Collect it all, tag it, store it ... And whatever it is you want, you go searching for it.""
What you're describing is a program from 20 years ago design to surveil limited parties in a limited geographic region overseas, during a war, in a place that enjoyed Stone Age information systems. That is not in the sense that the people in this discussion meant by blanket surveillance. They are talking about broad interception of all communications by U.S. persons, an undertaking that it should be obvious to you if you are in this industry would be economically if not thermodynamically impossible.
"After 9/11, they took one of the programs I had done, or the backend part of it, and started to use it to spy on everybody in this country. That was a program I created called Stellar Wind. That was seperate and compartmented from the regular activity which was ongoing because it was doing domestic spying. All the equipment was coming in, I knew something was happening but then when the contractors I had hired came and told me what they were doing, it was clear where all the hardware was going and what they were using it to do. It was simply a different input, instead of being foreign it was domestic." - William Binney
Civilian information systems have radically expanded in size since 2001, even if we take that ancient statement at face value. In the year 2025 it's crazy to believe that every newspaper is shouting that civilian information systems are destabilizing the national power grid and drying up the water table, but the government possesses a larger, far more capable information system that paradoxically has no observable physical presence.
"The Utah Data Center (UDC), also known as the Intelligence Community Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative Data Center, is a data storage facility for the United States Intelligence Community that is designed to store data estimated to be on the order of exabytes or larger."
"The structure provides 1 to 1.5 million sq ft (93,000 to 139,000 m2), with 100,000 sq ft (9,300 m2) of data center space and more than 900,000 sq ft (84,000 m2) of technical support and administrative space."
"The completed facility is expected to require 65 megawatts of electricity, costing about $40 million per year. Given its open-evaporation-based cooling system, the facility is expected to use 1.7 million US gal (6,400 m3) of water per day.
An article by Forbes estimates the storage capacity as between 3 and 12 exabytes as of 2013, based on analysis of unclassified blueprints, but mentions Moore's Law, meaning that advances in technology could be expected to increase the capacity by orders of magnitude in the coming years."
Open the two location articles in tabs, scroll down a little until you see the maps, or rather have them in good view, and then switch between them, fast, back and forth.
See what I mean?
There was more, but I don't have it ready ATM(storage long lost), and am too tired to research it again(reading many ugly government and business sites) but, shortly after it was officially known where that datacenter would be built, Millenniata (M-Disc) opened shop there.
I can't recall exactly anymore ATM, they may have incorporated smaller, elsewhere, near there, but the move to the final location came shortly after public/official knowledge of where that data center would be built.
Ain't that funny? :-)
Edit: Got another one, but probably unrelated because of the timeframe, but interesting nonetheless. Very advanced and fast flash storage(for the time, and in some aspects still, like retention time and durability).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lehi,_Utah where one of IM-Flash's(Joint Venture of Intel & Micron) factories was/is located (sold to Texas Instruments, producing other stuff now).
According to Sandvine, the vast majority of internet traffic from 2013 (chosen to coincide with the Forbes storage estimates) was video such as Netflix and Youtube[1] and remains so today[2]. Assuming NSA is aware of industry standard techniques such as data de-duplication and compression, Forbe's estimate of 3 - 12 exabytes in 2013 would have been sufficient to store the entire year's world internet traffic in full.
In 2025 The Internet Archive holds approximately 100 exabytes[3] and contains data dating back to 1995[4]. Adjusting the 2013 Forbes numbers for the Utah Data Center for 2025 storage density (4Tb drives in 2013, 36Tb drives in 2025) yields 27 - 108 exabytes. Which demonstrates clearly that a datacenter on the scale of the Utah Data Center is capable of storing and retaining a versioned history of a significant fraction of the world's internet over a significant period of time.
Assuming they prioritize metadata and unique traffic further extends the horizon on how much can be stored and for how long.
Maybe just the metadata, of which phone-number calls which other when and where? Who messages whom by email, messenger, whatever, when and where? For the graph of communications over time, with interesting nodes appearing, showing emerging clusters around them, whose members then could be targeted by other means?
"A striking feature of proceedings at the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) is that the executive always wins. Between 1979 and 2012—the first thirty-three years of the FISC’s existence—federal agencies submitted 33,900 ex parte requests to the court. The judges denied eleven and granted the rest: a 99.97% rate of approval."
"The newspaper reported that in "more than a dozen classified rulings, the nation's surveillance court has created a secret body of law giving the National Security Agency the power to amass vast collections of data on Americans""
So, by "court order" do you mean secret law and secret trials with a history of always deciding against those who are being surveilled? Because that's what was in Snowden's docs.
> "NSA Secretly Tapped Google, Yahoo Data Centers, Report Says"
This was for extracting email envelope metadata to build a graph of who was contacting whom, a program that Snowden's leaks showed had already been shut down.
> "A striking feature of proceedings at the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) is that the executive always wins. Between 1979 and 2012—the first thirty-three years of the FISC’s existence—federal agencies submitted 33,900 ex parte requests to the court. The judges denied eleven and granted the rest: a 99.97% rate of approval."
What do you think the approval rate for other court orders is? It's exactly the same.
> "The newspaper reported that in "more than a dozen classified rulings, the nation's surveillance court has created a secret body of law giving the National Security Agency the power to amass vast collections of data on Americans"
This reporting was at odds with what the leaked documents said and was later walked back.
> So, by "court order" do you mean secret law and secret trials with a history of always deciding against those who are being surveilled? Because that's what was in Snowden's docs.
That explicitly was not in Snowden's docs. The law is public, and warrants are almost always granted. In this case, as Snowden's docs said, the court orders are for foreigners, living outside the U.S.
> This was for extracting email envelope metadata to build a graph of who was contacting whom, a program that Snowden's leaks showed had already been shut down.
"According to Victor Marchetti, a former special assistant to the deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), a limited hangout is "spy jargon for a favorite and frequently used gimmick of the clandestine professionals. When their veil of secrecy is shredded and they can no longer rely on a phony cover story to misinform the public, they resort to admitting—sometimes even volunteering—some of the truth while still managing to withhold the key and damaging facts in the case."
> This reporting was at odds with what the leaked documents said and was later walked back.
The linked article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intellig... contains 96 references to reporting from 2004 to 2021 from a wide variety of sources. The word "retraction" does not appear once. Among the cited sources are many examples such as:
A former federal judge who served on a secret court overseeing the National Security Agency's secret surveillance programs said Tuesday the panel is independent but flawed because only the government's side is represented effectively in its deliberations.
"Anyone who has been a judge will tell you a judge needs to hear both sides of a case," said James Robertson, a former federal district judge based in Washington who served on the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court for three years between 2002 and 2005.
> "According to Victor Marchetti, a former special assistant to the deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), a limited hangout is "spy jargon for a favorite and frequently used gimmick of the clandestine professionals. When their veil of secrecy is shredded and they can no longer rely on a phony cover story to misinform the public, they resort to admitting—sometimes even volunteering—some of the truth while still managing to withhold the key and damaging facts in the case."
Then why didn't Snowden's doc show any illegal use of that data? Instead, he leaked many things that were perfectly legal as well as which high value targets were being surveilled in China in a transparent and failed attempt to get asylum in Hong Kong.
> "Two wrongs make a right" is considered "one of the most common fallacies in Western philosophy".
You are assuming it's wrong. Investigators aren't going to waste their time writing up court orders that aren't likely to be approved. Instead, we find that criminal defense attorneys rarely challenge the validity of warrants as issued but may challenge whether the warrant was followed.
> "Anyone who has been a judge will tell you a judge needs to hear both sides of a case," said James Robertson, a former federal district judge based in Washington who served on the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court for three years between 2002 and 2005.
You're confusing multiple things here. You're confusing bulk metadata collection, which Robertson opposed, with individual surveillance warrants, which are always done without informing the person being surveilled. There was no opposing side to the bulk metadata collection, which was shut down. There was no record of mass domestic surveillance in Snowden's docs.
Notably, all the glossy corporate logos pictured are of American companies with predominantly American users. Not foreign ones. "Its existence was leaked six years later by NSA contractor Edward Snowden"
> Then why didn't Snowden's doc show any illegal use of that data?
"Snowden's subsequent disclosures included statements that government agencies such as the United Kingdom's GCHQ also undertook mass interception and tracking of internet and communications data – described by Germany as "nightmarish" if true – allegations that the NSA engaged in "dangerous" and "criminal" activity by "hacking" civilian infrastructure networks in other countries such as "universities, hospitals, and private businesses", and alleged that compliance offered only very limited restrictive effect on mass data collection practices (including of Americans) since restrictions "are policy-based, not technically based, and can change at any time", adding that "Additionally, audits are cursory, incomplete, and easily fooled by fake justifications", with numerous self-granted exceptions, and that NSA policies encourage staff to assume the benefit of the doubt in cases of uncertainty."
> That's funny, because there's a full slide deck from NSA about it here:
Did you look at the slides you linked to? They describe targeted surveillance on specific foreigners outside the U.S.
> "Snowden's subsequent disclosures included statements that government agencies such as the United Kingdom's GCHQ also undertook mass interception and tracking of internet and communications data – described by Germany as "nightmarish" if true
Not a U.S. domestic surveillance program.
> allegations that the NSA engaged in "dangerous" and "criminal" activity by "hacking" civilian infrastructure networks in other countries such as "universities, hospitals, and private businesses",
Not a U.S. domestic surveillance program.
> and alleged that compliance offered only very limited restrictive effect on mass data collection practices (including of Americans) since restrictions "are policy-based, not technically based, and can change at any time", ...
The single U.S. mass data collection program in Snowden's leaks was phone metadata collection. Use of any data collected by the government is policy-based. In this case, use was limited to finding associates of foreign targets, and the query interface was limited to that. If it had changed, that would have been breaking the law, but Snowden showed no evidence of that. One more time: that single possibly illegal U.S. program Snowden leaked was then shut down anyway.
Many times. They detail methods and partners used in mass surveillance on US soil involving US corporations and US routed internet backbone connections. No independently verifiable proof is provided that US persons are not targeted by this program.
Instead we're gifted such lovely terms as LOVEINT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOVEINT in which the NSA admits to warrant-less domestic spying for the most trivial of reasons. Further demonstrating a lack of appropriate controls or process around such capabilities.
And testimony from "the agency official responsible for automating much of the NSA’s worldwide monitoring networks" indicating that mass surveillance infrastructure is used domestically: "After 9/11, they took one of the programs I had done, or the backend part of it, and started to use it to spy on everybody in this country. That was a program I created called Stellar Wind. That was seperate and compartmented from the regular activity which was ongoing because it was doing domestic spying. All the equipment was coming in, I knew something was happening but then when the contractors I had hired came and told me what they were doing, it was clear where all the hardware was going and what they were using it to do. It was simply a different input, instead of being foreign it was domestic." - William Binney
"However, in recent years, FVEY documents have shown that member agencies are intentionally spying on one another's private citizens and sharing the collected information with each other."
> They detail methods and partners used in mass surveillance on US soil involving US corporations and US routed internet backbone connections.
PRISM is a data ingestion system whereby the NSA ingests data collected by the FBI Data Intercept Technology Unit that gets data from specific accounts under court order. The DITU is clearly labeled in the diagram on the slide showing how it works. The NSA has no integration with the companies at all. The "Internet backbone" has nothing to do with PRISM.
> No independently verifiable proof is provided that US persons are not targeted by this program.
If the FBI gives a section 702 court order to a company for an account that isn't for a foreigner outside the U.S., they are not going to comply. The FBI wouldn't even ask. The very idea that you think "verifiable proof" is needed shows you believed the ridiculous conspiracy theory that the NSA could directly fetch any account's data, which was supported by neither the law nor the leaked documents but only by Greenwald's fever dreams
> Instead we're gifted such lovely terms as LOVEINT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOVEINT in which the NSA admits to warrant-less domestic spying for the most trivial of reasons.
Yet another document that you claim to have read but didn't. The cases where they were able to surveil the person they were stalking were foreigners outside the U.S. The domestic cases involved querying for associates using the metadata. Neither one is "domestic spying" and certainly don't show any evidence of domestic mass surveillance.
> "However, in recent years, FVEY documents have shown that member agencies are intentionally spying on one another's private citizens and sharing the collected information with each other."
Once again, if you bothered to read the source documents, you would find that this quote is not supported by the citations. The first citation shows that the U.S. The first is about how the U.S. is allowed to use UK phone numbers in its metadata collection for chaining analysis, not to share that data or analysis with the UK as the quote claims. The second is about how Australia is allowed to share data it collected outside the U.S. and the U.S. with the U.S. without first looking for and removing the data of Australians who happened to be abroad whose data was collected, not for the U.S. to spy on Australians as your quote claims.
Lesson: If you see a claim that describes something that is clearly illegal, you should verify it before you repeat stuff that is very clearly nonsense and come off as a tin foil hat wearing conspiracy theorist.
Yes I am familiar with the official statements. They do not constitute "independently verifiable proof ... that US persons are not targeted by this program." and carry far less weight than the previously quoted and linked testimony which directly contradicts them when considered in context of the disclosures.
The same folks you'd have us believe without question have lied repeatedly about these very programs:
Since the official statements aren't trustworthy, I'll accept independently verifiable (by a group like EFF) proof. I'd be a sillybilly to accept less.
Should be pretty easy. NSA has EFF's contact information from that lawsuit ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewel_v._National_Security_Age... ) in which they destroyed evidence against a court order, and argued "state secrets" against every claim. You know, the one that explicitly avoided deciding the constitutionality of all this on procedural grounds. Totally trustworthy behavior. Everyone responds that way when asked to prove they're not mass surveilling Americans.
> and carry far less weight than the previously quoted and linked testimony which directly contradicts them when considered in context of the disclosures
Previously quoted testimony from someone who doesn't claim to have been there when it was implemented that does not match up with the documents that Snowden leaked? You would think that if there were something so blatantly illegal going on, that would be the first thing that Snowden leaked. Instead, there is not a whiff of corroborating evidence in Snowden's trove, and no oversight committee senator has asked for investigations based on Binney's mad ravings.
> The same folks you'd have us believe without question have lied repeatedly about these very programs:
So you would have us believe that Snowden's documents are lying too? The lies that were told weren't about what the programs did. Their statements were always consistent with the leaked documents and what the law allows. You are the one bringing up dark programs that go against the law and against all leaked evidence.
> Since the official statements aren't trustworthy, I'll accept independently verifiable (by a group like EFF) proof. I'd be a sillybilly to accept less.
The EFF doesn't claim anything like what you're claiming. The purpose of the Narus traffic analyzers in the Jewel case was revealed in Snowden's docs. Surprise, surprise. It turned out not to be mass domestic surveillance.
> doesn't claim to have been there when it was implemented
"After 9/11, they took one of the programs I had done, or the backend part of it, and started to use it to spy on everybody in this country. That was a program I created called Stellar Wind. That was seperate and compartmented from the regular activity which was ongoing because it was doing domestic spying. All the equipment was coming in, I knew something was happening but then when the contractors I had hired came and told me what they were doing, it was clear where all the hardware was going and what they were using it to do. It was simply a different input, instead of being foreign it was domestic." - William Binney
> The EFF doesn't claim anything like what you're claiming.
2. This case challenges an illegal and unconstitutional program of dragnet
communications surveillance conducted by the National Security Agency (the “NSA”) and other
Defendants in concert with major telecommunications companies (“Defendants” is defined
collectively as the named defendants and the Doe defendants as set forth in paragraphs 25 through
38 below).
3. This program of dragnet surveillance (the “Program”), first authorized by Executive
Order of the President in October of 2001 (the “Program Order”) and first revealed to the public in
December of 2005, continues to this day.
4. Some aspects of the Program were publicly acknowledged by the President in
December 2005 and later described as the “terrorist surveillance program” (“TSP”).
5. The President and other executive officials have described theTSP’s activities, which
were conducted outside the procedures of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (“FISA”) and
without authorization by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (“FISC”), as narrowly targeting
for interception the international communications of persons linked to Al Qaeda.
6. The Attorney General and the Director of National Intelligence have since publicly
admitted that the TSP was only one particular aspect of the surveillance activities authorized by the
Program Order.
7. In addition to eavesdropping on or reading specific communications, Defendants
have indiscriminately intercepted the communications content and obtained the communications
records of millions of ordinary Americans as part of the Program authorized by the President.
8. The core component of the Program is Defendants’ nationwide network of
sophisticated communications surveillance devices, attached to the key facilities of
telecommunications companies such as AT&T that carry Americans’ Internet and telephone
communications.
9. Using this shadow network of surveillance devices, Defendants have acquired and
continue to acquire the content of a significant portion of the phone calls, emails, instant messages,
text messages, web communications and other communications, both international and domestic,
of practically every American who uses the phone system or the Internet, including Plaintiffs and
class members, in an unprecedented suspicionless general search through the nation’s
communications networks.
10. In addition to using surveillance devices to acquire the domestic and international
communications content of millions of ordinary Americans, Defendants have unlawfully solicited
and obtained from telecommunications companies such as AT&T the complete and ongoing
disclosure of the private telephone and Internet transactional records of those companies’ millions
of customers (including communications records pertaining to Plaintiffs and class members),
communications records indicating who the customers communicated with, when and for how long,
among other sensitive information.
11. This non-content transactional information is analyzed by computers in conjunction
with the vast quantity of communications content acquired by Defendants’ network of surveillance
devices, in order to select which communications are subjected to personal analysis by staff of the
NSA and other Defendants, in what has been described as a vast “data-mining” operation.
12. Plaintiffs and class members are ordinary Americans who are current or former
subscribers to AT&T’s telephone and/or Internet services.
13. Communications of Plaintiffs and class members have been and continue to be
illegally acquired by Defendants using surveillance devices attached to AT&T’s network, and
Defendants have illegally solicited and obtained from AT&T the continuing disclosure of private
communications records pertaining to Plaintiffs and class members. Plaintiffs’ communications or
activities have been and continue to be subject to electronic surveillance.
14. Plaintiffs are suing Defendants to enjoin their unlawful acquisition of the
communications and records of Plaintiffs and class members, to require the inventory and
destruction of those that have already been seized, and to obtain appropriate statutory, actual, and
punitive damages to deter future illegal surveillance.
> All the equipment was coming in, I knew something was happening but then when the contractors I had hired came and told me what they were doing, it was clear where all the hardware was going
In other words, he didn't know where it was going and speculated. No such program existed in Snowden's leaks, and no member of the SSCI or HPSCI believes Binney's wild hypothesis, or it would be the first thing they investigated.
> [Old Jewel claims snipped]
I very clearly stated the EFF doesn't (present tense) claim what you're claiming. The EFF saw the Narus analyzers in 641A and assumed the worst, which is in those old claims you pasted, and the judge said that the plaintiffs didn't have evidence to show that their data was collected, which would be the case if it were really mass domestic surveillance. Then Snowden's documents were released, conclusively showing the devices weren't used for domestic surveillance, which is why the EFF didn't bring that lawsuit again claiming standing. Snowden's docs proved they didn't have it.
"After 9/11, they took one of the programs I had done, or the backend part of it, and started to use it to spy on everybody in this country. That was a program I created called Stellar Wind. That was seperate and compartmented from the regular activity which was ongoing because it was doing domestic spying. All the equipment was coming in, I knew something was happening but then when the contractors I had hired came and told me what they were doing, it was clear where all the hardware was going and what they were using it to do. It was simply a different input, instead of being foreign it was domestic." - William Binney
Clear as day to me. Only reason to chop it up or not cite the source would be to misrepresent what he said.
> I very clearly stated the EFF doesn't (present tense) claim what you're claiming.
"In February 2015, Judge White dismissed the latest motion by the EFF, accepting the NSA's argument that the requirements placed upon the agency would engender the "impermissible disclosure of state secret information." White also held that the plaintiffs did not have standing to pursue their claims.[20] This procedural ruling allowed White to avoid addressing the constitutionality of the NSA's mass surveillance program.[21]
Upon the disclosure of more information about the NSA's surveillance methods, the EFF filed another motion in May 2017 requesting that the agency disclose information about surveillance conducted against Carolyn Jewel and the other plaintiffs. Judge White granted this motion and ordered the government to hand over the information.[22][23] However, the NSA filed a motion in opposition to that order, claiming once again that the plaintiffs lacked the standing to sue. After further arguments, the District Court accepted this argument in April 2019.[24]
The EFF appealed that ruling to the Ninth Circuit. In a memorandum opinion, that court ruled in favor of the NSA, once again on the matter of standing.[25] In June 2022, the EFF made a final request to the U.S. Supreme Court to take the case, but that court rejected the request and did not grant certiorari."
No retraction. A willingness to take it all the way to the supreme court. Procedurally dismissed without deciding any of the issues raised. Clear and present.
Unfortunately Binney has absolutely lost it and can’t be considered credible.. literally hanging out with Alex Jones and talking about Stolen elections using math a
precocious middle schooler could rebut.
His pinned Tweet is still referencing a “directed energy weapon” assassination attempt of him by the US Air Force (which took place during the Trump administration, who he was supporting, so apparently some rogue DEW plane or deep state operative?)
Every human has ideas and opinions others disagree with. However, as Technical Director and later geopolitical world Technical Director of NSA with over 30 years of SIGINT service, literally no one is in a better position to know about NSA surveillance activities.
It is, in fact, a direct contradiction of what you've said. There is no independently verifiable proof that NSA mass surveillance has stopped or even slowed. And a great deal of evidence to the contrary. EFF maintains a lovely list of primary sources: https://www.eff.org/nsa-spying/nsadocs#main-content
> There is no independently verifiable proof that NSA mass surveillance has stopped or even slowed
Mass surveillance outside the U.S. is not illegal. There is no reason for that to have slowed. The documents showed no mass "surveillance" inside the U.S. The only mass collection was phone metadata collection, which wasn't used for surveilling anybody, only to spit out possible associates of specific people under surveillance.
You will claim this program does not target US persons. To which I have already responded in another comment that "They detail methods and partners used in mass surveillance on US soil involving US corporations and US routed internet backbone connections. No independently verifiable proof is provided that US persons are not targeted by this program."
NSA self-reporting of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOVEINT incidents seems to indicate that warrant-less surveillance of US persons does, in fact, happen. As does testimony from "the agency official responsible for automating much of the NSA’s worldwide monitoring networks": "After 9/11, they took one of the programs I had done, or the backend part of it, and started to use it to spy on everybody in this country. That was a program I created called Stellar Wind. That was seperate and compartmented from the regular activity which was ongoing because it was doing domestic spying. All the equipment was coming in, I knew something was happening but then when the contractors I had hired came and told me what they were doing, it was clear where all the hardware was going and what they were using it to do. It was simply a different input, instead of being foreign it was domestic." - William Binney
I was sitting in the auditorium, early 2010s at DEF CON ~X[¿I?]X~, when General Alexander gave the headlining speech of that conference (then-Director of NSA).
Within the speech he defined the world "intercept," within the intelligence community, as meaning a human operator has (in some manner) catalogued some piece of information.
The implication was that all data in stored forever, and machine learning tasks were making associations without meeting their definition of "having been intercepted" — even with the elementary ML of fifteen years ago, this was a striking admission.
----
This was among the first things I thought about during my initial weeks using GPT-3.5 (~January 2023): that most of these conversations wouldn't be considered "intercepted" despite this immense capability of humanless understanding.
Now, almost three years later, I_just_hope_our_names_touch_on_this_watchlist.jpg
>We know now that communications are being intercepted in bulk as a matter of intelligence gathering, but that does not equate to everyone being surveilled by the government.
Yeah it does. Especially because its being added to a very searchable database that can be accessed via a bewildering number of people.
Having tried skydiving thie makes me shiver. Scary
Others in plane quickly jump out , maybe to avoid being in plane if it crashes ?
The Australian Transport Safety Bureau has released heart-stopping footage of the moment a skydiver’s reserve parachute snagged on the aircraft from which he was jumping, leaving him dangling 15,000ft above ground.
Hamas hid tons of baby formula to damage Israel with starvation claims, Palestinian activist says
Hamas hid tons of baby formula and nutritional shakes meant for kids inside a warehouse to allow Gazans to starve and further its claims of widespread famine to undermine Israel, a US-based Palestinian activist claimed. Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, an anti-Hamas activist, accused the terror group of hoarding food meant for infants and young children to purposefully increase starvation in Gaza and damage the public perception of Israel.
Obviously needs to be verified ..... as there has been lots propaganda in this war ( my belief) from both sides I suspect ....
I mean, it would be better. The other option is to take them out of water. There is no universe where the only option to deal with shipwrecked people is to kill them.
In a war situation, which this was not, this is a war crime.
A interesting related technical explanation from Reddit
"...NukeRocketScientist
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1d ago
There's really only two ways to physically lower the likelihood of bit flips from cosmic rays, one, redundancy, and two, increasing the distance between transistors. One of the downsides of making transistors as small as they are nowadays, they are much more prone to bit flips. This is due to when a cosmic ray proton at high energy interacts with materials, you can get essentially a "splashing" effect of electrons around where the proton went through the material. By having transistors as close as possible this splashing or shockwave of electrons has a higher likelihood of electrons flowing into the transistors imparting a charge and causing a 0 to flip to a 1. Redundancy is important as a cosmic ray interacting with one computer chip wouldn't have any effects on another one nearby and like you said for error checking as well.
You could of course try to physically shield the computer, but trying to stop a cosmic ray proton is far easier said than done as they can travel at more than 50% the speed of light depending on energy. It can also be even worse if you don't stop the proton fully as cosmic rays stop both kinetically and electromagnetically causing the cosmic ray to impart more of its energy into the material than if it was at much higher energy. This is called the Bragg peak and is important in proton beam therapy for treating cancer.
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