I don't think the NSA spied on EVERYONE in America

The National Security Agency is an entity with finite resources. They've got a lot of them, but eventually they run out of receivers, recorders, transcribers and analysts. And if they're looking at e-mail, even the hottest supercomputer in the world can't examine every e-mail that's sent by someone in the United States for keywords.

It's fun to think they're omnipotent, but they're not.

So let me put you in a situation. You're a mission control officer at NSA and you've been given the mission to spy on Americans. Which one would you do:

1) Attempt to process everything in case someone says a bad word against our little emperor...

or

2) Make a list of a couple thousand people you KNOW hate Bush, and try for continuous coverage on those specific targets?

I know who I'm going after if I'm MCO:
-every elected Democrat in America, even dogcatchers
-the leadership of the Democratic Party
-the hundred or so most-respected antiwar activists, liberal journalists, artists and certain cartoonists.
-the owners of the top twenty anti-Bush websites

I think Skinner was targeted. I don't think Southlandshari was.
I know Will Pitt was targeted, but have grave doubts about DemoTex.
I'd also be very suspicious if I was Eric Blumrich, Symbolman, American Stranger, Bartcop, Michael Rectenwald, earlg, or any other very prominent anti-Bush personality on the Internets. I don't think Bartcop will survive the year--I expect him to wind up like Danny Casolaro.
He isn't going after rank-and-file Bush haters--because there is no way in the world they can target 150 million people. No one is that big. He is going after the people who individually pose a threat to him. Most of us here do not.

and they can't catch everything, I believe this whole AHHHH! THE NSA IS SPYING ON EVERYONE is just a smoke screen to conceal the fact bush is targeting certain americans that he doesnt want us to know about.

with say any one of oh 400 terror related words, they probably got 60,000 hits a day for how many months? Oh they're probably looking at this now becouse it has the T word in it.

which means we only know a fraction of who was targeted. The above examples are certainly included, but the list isn't limited to that.

is just bullshit nothing else, its not like they have alot of analyzers and its not like they have stopped the 911 attacks, the london bombings and the bombings in iraq or even located Osama Bin Laden, you are being fed disinformation by this crooked administration the truth is Bush is targeting Americans for his own person gain, that is why he wants to avoid going to court being he knows if it got out who he was spying on he could become the next Richard Nixon.

Bush isn't going after you or I. (Well, unless you are Will Pitt or David Allen from thoughtcrimes.org, and then you're screwed.) We mean nothing to him--we are neither a benefit nor a threat to him, so we're not getting our taxes cut and we're not getting our phones tapped.

Bush is targeting two groups of people: those who can economically damage his patrons, and those who can politically/legally damage him. If you can pose a serious challenge to a senator he needs to push legislation through, every phone you have is currently tapped. If you have a way to sell flooring less expensively than Bob Nardelli can, Bush has your number...on an NSA tasking memorandum. And if you're a journalist who's not aligned with the BFEE...son, an exterminator convention's got less bugs than your house, so you better start playing those Ozzy albums full blast.

those with overseas connections, and political enemies.Emails would have to match many of the words to attract any attention.add unions to the "listened to" group. Welcome to DU, belatedly.
nice to see someone else in Freeperside co. Cat city here.

You're right, it would be ridiculous to try and spy on every American (imagine how boring that must be). However, I believe the number they have spied on is a lot higher than the public would stand for (well I mean us really, not John Q). If Nixon is any indication about paranoia then I expect these guys to have spied on a shit load of people, some probably warrant less and illegal. I hope you're wrong about Bartcop, but I won't be surprised if his site gets shutdown.

I suspect nearly every email (that travels over the public internet), many if not all international phone calls, a surprisingly high percentage of interstate and intrastate phone calls, and almost every "blog" is monitored, almost 100 percent of which is done via software and computers (not human). A very small fraction, which hits certain profiles (some of which have been posted here) is looked at by human analysts. Out of that, another even smaller fraction is singled out for further attention (wire taps and so on). We now know that there were thousands of illegal wire taps (and thousands more legal ones)... so it's not a stretch to say millions to billions of intercepts every day.

I've been in the supercomputer biz for 25 years (Cray 1's to present), and I worked for a company that sold a supercomputer to the "Brown Company". I went there to install it. That was some time back... and even then, they were doing a *lot* more than even the wildest imagination might dream up. With a black budget in the billions (similar to NASA), a lot of smart people, and one mission (collect signals intelligence), well... I'd be very surprised if they didn't monitor almost everything... including this little missive on what they might be capable of.

it seems that the daily text communications of everyone in the US would be well within the capabilities of software analysis and more if warranted by the presence of keywords, word combinations, etc.

Yes even the DAta mining gatekeepers have to keep everyone on their toes

ON orders of the BUSH Administration-- NSA spied on it's own employees; including the DIA and CIA.-along with their congressional and journalist contacts.

FIST FRUITS- was/is a surveillance programme and part of DCI- Director of CEntral Intelligence--and maintained til OCt-2004 this was authorized as part of DCI's Foreign Denial and Deception Committee- FDDC Porter Goss, now directing CIA, used to run the show.

DCI- is now apart of the DNI- Director of National Intelligence- headed by JOhn Negroponte---death squads in El Salvador and death squad militias set up in IRAQ, with his complicity most likely.-- The other clown as deputy director is former NSA director General Hayden.

the murky world of parasitical intelligence outfits that do less for your security and more for the elites------US- patriots are hubristic sheep-- to proud to admit their egregious backing of the criminal clique as your security Saviour's!:patriot:

1%, 5%, 10%, 50% 75%, 100%?

One is too many for my tastes and the Constitution/Laws of this country. I do not really care how many it was. I care it happened at all.

But we have to put this thing into perspective here...I've been seeing all this "oh, the NSA is spying on MEEEEEE" stuff, and the NSA is probably NOT spying on you.

I'm standing by the "NSA is crawling up Will Pitt's ass" idea instead of "NSA is sampling every e-mail that's sent anywhere in America." NSA doesn't give a shit about 99.9999999999998 percent of the e-mails that are sent in the US. They don't have time to.

just handle the junk e-mails I get. What about the other 200 plus million Americans?

"practically the whole population, and everyone was classified in a category. Thus statistics were available in every town (and) all incriminating material collected. . . was also entered in the files, and each person's card was marked to show how dangerous he was considered; this depending on the amount of suspicious or incriminating material appearing in his files." Thus, it was relatively easy, when Moscow made the decision for a purge, "to have a certain percentage of the population arrested. . . The average for the whole of the Soviet Union was about 3 per cent." And as this information was "regularly reported to higher authorities, it was possible to arrange a purge at any moment, with full knowledge of the exact number of persons in each category."

And this, mind, was in a nation with relatively stunted technology (1930s Soviet Union) and all information was stored on index cards.


Source: Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Part III, Chapter 12: "Totalitarianism in Power."

Essentially, half the country was spying on the other half. Their goal was literally to have an informant in every home.

In reality, they probably had one or two on every street. Those individual informants would submit their reports to the district NKVD office, who would compile a big manual database on their area and send it up the line.

And don't dis index cards, man, if you know how to set up an index card file they can be more powerful than a computerized database.

Whatever they did, they are no closer to catching Osama . . .

or the Anthrax murderer, for that matter.

and even if they are, they wont hurt me, I've done nothing wrong. The NSA is not spying on me....:sarcasm:

or anyone else who is guilty of absolutely nothing!

Google ECHELON (NSA) and CARNIVORE (FBI). Essentially the same thing, they electronically intercept every email, fax, radio, satellite, telephone nearly everywhere in the world, then use high-speed computers to pick out key words.

All they need is a lot on money to buy a lot of large computers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnivore_%28FBI%29

When those stories started surfacing that the Bush administration knew damn well that Saddam Hussein had not tried to buy uranium from Niger, they knew that someone was talking to the press. Since they had only a small number of suspects and since they couldn't get a warrent because then they'd have to own up to a judge that someone was spilling the beans on their own lies, I'll bet that the tapped Joe's phone.

Wouldn't be a kicker if that's how Shrubco learned about Valerie.

You can put Colon Pile on that list too and any possible Rethug Presidential nominations...like John McCain.

Whenever a bill comes up that's close ...two bits he knows just what the fence sitters are thinking.
He knows everything except what dummy Joe citizen knows. He knows just who he has wrapped around his little finger and who needs working on. There is nothing important that he doesn't know! He scares the sh** out of me...and dammit he knows it!

They are capturing SO much data that they actually had to go to the phone companies and ask for access to their switches.

It's all just digital data streams to them and they've got huge pipes and huge hard drive farms to capture it all. They let computers hunt through it for keywords using voice recognition and in the case of email have banks of computers running lots of programs that go over it looking for messages. They categorize it and put it into databases and then they can pull up what they want. Imagine the SETI program on a much larger scale except that theres actually something to listen to.

They save the human analysts for specific interesting things.

That they are hunting through everything means though that:

1) They could easily pull up John Forbes Kerry and listen in just as easily as Osama bin Laden.
2) There could never be a warrant issued for this because a warrant requires probable cause and to have probable cause you must first have a specific suspect or suspects. You can't write a warrant asking to listen to everyone, everywhere, all the time.

Doug D.
Orlando, FL

too. That's how they know when and where to cheat! Probably zoomed in on every voter registration data bank in the counrty.

that would add whole new levels of complexity to what they are doing..

These systems are interconnected either through the phone cloud or the internet cloud. Some are not connected though and have their results hand carried from a precinct back to the central tabulators.

While it is possible, I think they were probably just spying on:
1) People they thought were terrorists.
2) Probably also on their political enemies, John Kerry, John Edwards, Howard Dean, Wesley Clark, Colin Powell, Terry McAuliffe, MoveOn head honchos, PFAW head honchos, etc., etc.

We'll probably never know though because there will be so little of a paper trail. It will be harder to detangle than Watergate because that was a physical breakin with suspects who were arrested and they could follow the money trail back up to the Oval Office.

Doug D.

The process is invasive, and whether it's 10 or 10 million makes no difference. They don't need to analyze the data until it suits them. That's the problem. It's preemptive spying.

Check out what I wrote here:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=104&topic_id=5717368&mesg_id=5719177

Doug D.

You're giving them MUCH TOO MUCH CREDIT THAN THEY DESERVE.

MIX KATRINA AND IRAQ WAR INCOMPETENCE WITH HOMELAND SECURITY AND JUST STOP AND THINK ABOUT HOW IT COULD BE ANY OTHER WAY!!!!!!!!!!!!

Homeland security is invading homes by the droves...taking computers....you could be on instant messager....talk to someone that is threatening...even be ASSOCIATED with people that might be of some interest....and suddenly get a knock on the door.

There's no rhyme or reason to it.

THAT'S EXACTLY WHY IT IS THAT MUCH MORE INSIDOUS.

DON'T FOR ONE MOMENT THINK YOU'RE BEING SPECIFICALLY TARGETED.
THAT WOULD BE MUCH TOO MUCH TO THEIR CREDIT.
THINK OF IT AS THE INCOMPETENCE IN YOUR LOCAL WORKPLACE.
NO ONE IN CHARGE...NO ONE REALLY KNOWING WHAT'S GOING ON.
DON'T BE PARANOID.
FIGHT BACK.

all communications go through existing systems and if corp usa is cooperating it is really a trivial task to run then through their filters not to mention target ANYONE they want.

peace