NSA boss tells lawmakers the gov't wants even more data, 'dozens' of attacks thwarted [2nd Amend]

Foreign Policy ^ | 6/12/2013 | John Reed

[PieterCasparzen]

National Security Agency chief Gen. Keith Alexander may be under fire for collecting millions of Americans' phone records and Internet data. But the nation's top electronic spy told a Congressional panel Wednesday that he wants the feds to slurp up even more information - and distribute it more widely throughout the government.
...
The NSA, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and the FBI -- a trio Alexander described as the core of the U.S. Federal Cybersecurity Team (a term we haven't heard before) -- are developing an "information sharing environment that will create a cross-governmental shared situational awareness that is [extenable] to other partners such as state and local governments and our allies," according to Alexander's written opening statement

In English, that means the government is developing a way to collect and share cyber intelligence from a ton of sources. For example, the NSA can share intelligence it collects on foreign actors (and perhaps U.S. actors too, given last week's news) with DHS; the FBI can share cyber intelligence it collects domestically with the NSA; or a local government can share information with the NSA, DHS, or FBI.
...

[PieterCasparzen]

Now for A DIFFERENT article, which is interesting given the above article. The FBI is reported to have all sorts of information on people that it could possibly share:

Mental-Health Records Missing From Gun-Dealer Database

From the Wall Street Journal, By Jack Nicas, 12/20/2012

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324731304578191312121328632.html

"Despite recent progress in some states, millions of mental-health records remain missing from the national database that gun dealers use to run background checks on potential buyers, according to a new analysis of federal data by a coalition of U.S. mayors.

Federal law prohibits firearms sales to anyone declared mentally unfit by a court or similar body. In the 1990s, the FBI began assembling a national database of individuals prohibited from buying firearms, partly with the help of a 1993 federal law that required states to report mental-health records to the FBI.
...

Mayors Against Illegal Guns, an advocacy group co-headed by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, found in its analysis that 19 states have provided fewer than 100 mental-health records each to the national database, representing 100 or perhaps fewer people.

But it also found that some states have recently made strides, contributing to a 40% increase in records reported from October 2011 to October 2012.

Delaware, Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Minnesota, Ohio and Oregon all more than doubled their numbers of mental-health records in the national database over the period, according to the data. All eight states recently began to implement new laws requiring or authorizing state agencies to share such records.

Delaware had long struggled with state privacy laws that prohibited such sharing. So Delaware Gov. Jack Markell said he pushed to change that with a new law last year. By October, the state had reported about 18,700 mental- health records, according to the data, from zero a year earlier."
...

In light of both of these articles, I can't help but wonder...

The data sharing that Gen. Alexander said is already being developed - will it include:

a) Mental health records ?
b) Gun registrations ?
c) Arrest Records ?
d) Background Check Requests ?
e) Gun sales ?
f) Military records ?
g) State and Local records, like Family Court, etc.

The specification of what FBI and Homeland Security data is shared with NSA will not be public.

There is certainly no way anyone outside of those agencies can verify what information is shared with NSA.

The American public will never know for certain what information NSA has and how they are using it.

Having some of this information would allow NSA to construct lists of some interesting cross sections of the American population.

[PieterCasparzen]

Ping the old list.

[zzeeman]

Thank you for the ping, Pieter.

[Hardraade]

Two interesting points:

Parts of PRISM are reportedly being declassified.

and, more and more, any disagreement with government is being classified as mental illness.

[justa-hairyape]

Absolutely amazing that these cronies would even have the moxie to state they can stop terrorist attacks after Boston. These idiots cannot even stop terrorists from walking across our southern border. They wont even investigate Islamic Mosques that are known worldwide to harbor and abet terrorist organizations. Our own government through welfare and financial assistance probably funds half the terrorists within the US (Boston, etc.). And even lets them go back to their home countries to attend terrorist training camps (Chechnya, etc.).

[Cvengr]

The new DataCenter in Utah is to have a capacity of 5 Zettabytes (zetta/zeta?).

All worldwide PCs and communication devices (Cameras, cellphones, HDTVs, ....+dishwashers) by 2016 are to total 4.1 zettabytes in storage and operations.

Of course that is dwarfed by the Las Vegas Data Center, which is twice the size. (not to mention the Chinese LangFang Data Center 3 times that size)

[Cvengr]

1024^1 = 1 KiloByte
1024^2 = 1 MegaByte
1024^3 = 1 GigaByte
1024^4 = 1 TeraByte
1024^5 = 1 PetaByte
1024^5 = 1 ExaByte
1024^7 = 1 ZettaByte

Zetta french for 7

[Cvengr]

I haven’t returned to academia for a while to verify the state of the art.

Some people are saying the intel analysis capacity is near real time to the point of being able of predicting what people are saying in cell phone traffic.

I don’t fully understand their meaning and their metrics, but without grasping it, we don’t know the operational scale of the intel community.

Is it really necessary to build such massive data collection systems, when we are unwilling to act on a midnight phone call from Benghazi to save a US Ambassador under duress? Obviously this Administration doesn’t need it.

[PieterCasparzen]

“NSA surveillance played little role in foiling terror plots, experts say”

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3030416/posts

[pepsionice]

One of the great issues with intelligence gathered....is that if you don’t use it....then it’s a shame to collect it.

The problem here if you dig into the PRISM stuff...there’s almost a daily briefing extended to the President, with his political experts sitting in the room. All the President has to do...is ask the PRISM guy if they could monitor a certain telephone number and say over a four-week period who is calling that number. The PRISM guy has to be cooperative about this stuff, but the system wasn’t made for the President to be the guy asking favors for stuff like this.

Abuse of the system is very likely. We see already what abuse has done to the IRS, and truthfully...we aren’t willing to see IRS continue down this path.

[palmer]

It's pretty likely they are choking on all that data (serves no legitimate purpose). Here's a puff piece on the tech: http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/commentary/big-data-analytics/defending-nsa-prisms-big-data-tools/240156388# and even a puff piece can't articulate how they can stop actual terrorism with it. Specifically:

"By bringing data sets together, [Accumulo] allowed us to see things in the data that we didn't necessarily see from looking at the data from one point or another," Dave Hurry, head of NSA's computer science research section, told InformationWeek last fall. Accumulo gives NSA the ability "to take data and to stretch it in new ways so that you can find out how to associate it with another piece of data and find those threats."

They are going to "stretch" my phone call records "in new ways" to find threats? Don't think so.

[cripplecreek]

Lets not forget snail mail and the Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program which photographs envelopes as mail passes through sorting equipment at large sorting facilities.

While I won’t make any claims about them photographing actual letters inside the envelopes, they’re most definitely capable of doing so. After all, science has been photographing paintings that were painted over for 20 or 30 years.

We’re in a near perfect surveillance state now and terrorism still happens.

[SampleMan]

Whenever they state that they have “stopped terrorist attacks” I wonder if they are referring to the equivalent of TSA catching granny with nail clippers.

[Psalm 73]

If Congress does not stop this insanity - “We the People” may have to....(again)

[IamConservative]

Some people are saying the intel analysis capacity is near real time to the point of being able of predicting what people are saying in cell phone traffic.

There are commercial Voip based phone system products on the market today that do real time voice stream content analysis. Pretty common usage in call centers. No doubt you could have a machine "listen" to calls and alert the spooks.

That said, you can also encrypt Voip packets easily since the are digital. That is where NSA snooping can be foiled.

[joshua c]

President Obama is the best president ever!

Repeat enough times to fill up a Zettabyte with useless information.

How many calls do you make in a day? What if you called your home phone from your cell a hundred times?

Fill their databases to the brim with useless information.

[Black Agnes]

Don’t rely on any encryption. Even IF they can’t break it now, they’ll just store it and analyze it when they can.

[Ghost of SVR4]

It all depends on the encryption algorithm. The heavier the encryption, the heavier the machine that needs to do the encrypting and decryption which means more $$$; that most likely won’t fly for many consumers, business, most likely. It still does not defeat capturing and storing the packets for later re-construction and decryption. As well, just a single TCP packet can reveal A LOT about where you are, who your destination receiver is, what protocol, time, etc..Just a single TCP packet out of hundreds of thousands (more likely millions) per VOIP call.

[M Kehoe]

Good morning.

Maybe I'm just a conspiracy theorist...

The NSA feeding information to the IRS, HHS, and Valerie Jarrett.

What possibly could go wrong...?

5.56mm

[Count of Monte Fisto]

We’re in a near perfect surveillance state now and terrorism still happens.

Which can mean only two things: the surveillance is useless or that they want the terrorism to happen.