Clear and near-balmy this early Friday on California’s north coast as we rally for the weekend.
Once again this morning, the moon hangs like a white-bright-eye in the western sky.
And speaking of the eye in the sky — President Obama is scheduled for one of the most-important speeches of his see-saw career today on the subject of the extended-outreach program of the NSA.
As if for emphasis, yesterday the Guardian reported: The National Security Agency has collected almost 200 million text messages a day from across the globe, using them to extract data including location, contact networks and credit card details, according to top-secret documents.
(Illustration found here).
Also: The NSA program, codenamed Dishfire, collects “pretty much everything it can”, according to GCHQ documents, rather than merely storing the communications of existing surveillance targets.
Covering “everything” can be daunting. The newspaper said, on average, the NSA snags more than 5 million missed-call alerts; details of 1.6 million border crossings a day, from network roaming alerts; more than 110,000 names, from electronic business cards, which also included the ability to extract and save images; more than 800,000 financial transactions, either through text-to-text payments or linking credit cards to phone users; and:
The agency was also able to extract geolocation data from more than 76,000 text messages a day, including from “requests by people for route info” and “setting up meetings”.
Other travel information was obtained from itinerary texts sent by travel companies, even including cancellations and delays to travel plans.
Other than that, really nothing at all.
In all these disclosures the past eight or nine months, it’s been shown the NSA is obviously completely out of control, and if allowed to continue will mean the end to a private life, not only in the US, but the entire freakin’ world. Just as soon as we’re able to digest one bit of information, another pops up — there seems no conclusion to the dumb-ass, useless and super-expensive bullshit this spy in the ‘everything‘ has become.
And just to show how shitty the whole NSA crap — private security expert, Bruce Schneier, gave a private information-upgrade to several Congresscritters yesterday, because, apparently and obviously, they were getting nothing out of the NSA directly.
Schneier posted on his blog:
This morning I spent an hour in a closed room with six Members of Congress: Rep. Lofgren, Rep. Sensenbrenner, Rep. Scott, Rep. Goodlate, Rep Thompson, and Rep. Amash.
No staffers, no public: just them.
Lofgren asked me to brief her and a few Representatives on the NSA.
She said that the NSA wasn’t forthcoming about their activities, and they wanted me — as someone with access to the Snowden documents — to explain to them what the NSA was doing.
Of course I’m not going to give details on the meeting, except to say that it was candid and interesting.
And that it’s extremely freaky that Congress has such a difficult time getting information out of the NSA that they have to ask me.
I really want oversight to work better in this country.
Surreal part of setting up this meeting: I suggested that we hold this meeting in a SCIF, because they wanted me to talk about top secret documents that had not been made public.
The problem is that I, as someone without a clearance, would not be allowed into the SCIF.
So we had to have the meeting in a regular room.
EDITED TO ADD: This really was an extraordinary thing.
No shit!
Marcy Wheeler at emptywheel discusses the meeting, noting: I’m as intrigued by the make-up of the group as I am by the fact they needed to do this.
See more on this out-of-the-box intelligence briefing at Firedoglake and at HuffPost.
And as we wait for Obama’s “statement,” the smoke-screen privacy of how the NSA is operating has so startled even Congress, some members have taken this more-unorthodox approach to seek reality on the agency’s information suck-hole. This is a most-strong indicator drastic measures are required, but…
Although there’s a sense the president won’t do much to curb the excess, supposedly there’s a strong punch in the works via Obama’s speech, and the NSA’s telephone metadata collection program will end “as it currently exists” — from CNN this morning:
According to the official, the president will recommend that the collection of Americans’ phone records remain at the NSA temporarily as he seeks input from Congress and the U.S. intelligence community on where to store the data permanently.
Effective immediately, the NSA will have to seek approval from the federal surveillance court before querying the database, a second senior administration official said.
“This is going much further than people thought,” the official said.
Yet…
The White House was tight-lipped when asked about the President’s response to the recommendations and any proposed changes.
“I know there’s a lot of speculation about what decisions he has made and, in some cases, there have been assertions of fact about decisions he’s made that I know for a fact he had not yet made when those assertions of fact were made in the press,” White House spokesman Jay Carney said, noting that he would not speculate on what was forthcoming.
Cosmetic is the actual word.
Obama’s speech will piss-off some, make others somewhat happy, but for everyone it will be disappointing, very-much like his presidency.