Posted on 06/06/2013 7:10:52 PM PDT by kristinn
Analysts at the National Security Agency can now secretly access real-time user data provided by as many as 50 American companies, ranging from credit rating agencies to internet service providers, two government officials familiar with the arrangements said.
Several of the companies have provided records continuously since 2006, while others have given the agency sporadic access, these officials said. These officials disclosed the number of participating companies in order to provide context for a series of disclosures about the NSA's domestic collection policies. The officials, contacted independently, repeatedly said that "domestic collection" does not mean that the target is based in the U.S. or is a U.S. citizen; rather, it refers only to the origin of the data.
The Wall Street Journal reported today that U.S. credit card companies had also provided customer information. The officials would not disclose the names of the companies because, they said, doing so would provide U.S. enemies with a list of companies to avoid. They declined to confirm the list of participants in an internet monitoring program revealed by the Washington Post and the Guardian, but both confirmed that the program existed.
"The idea is to create a mosaic. We get a tip. We vet it. Then we mine the data for intelligence," one of the officials said.
SNIP
From the different types of data, including their credit card purchases, the locations they sign in to the internet from, and even local police arrest logs, the NSA can track people it considers terrorism or espionage suspects in near-real time. An internet geo-location cell is on constant standby to help analysts determine where a subject logs in from.
(Excerpt) Read more at theweek.com ...
Hey NSA! Suck wind. Clapper, Holder, Rice, ya copy?
Rush Limbaugh played some of Senator Obama's speeches today where he was CONDEMNING the Bush administration for the very things HE is doing now, and worse! Is the MSM covering this blatant hypocrisy? WILL they???
Marker
Never blame the CIA for your own (Obama’s) incompetence.
They bite back...
David Petraeus was outed by the White House apparently because he wouldn’t play ball with the Benghazi thing and his underlings weren’t amused. That would be my guess...
Check this out:
The New York Times added a few key words to their story since it was first released to lower the damage...
Oh, well, thank goodness, now they can vet the usurper, huh.
We heard about PRISM years ago so who thought it necessary to bring it back into the headlines at this particular time and why?
Unconstitutional means to achieve constitutional ends.
Hmmm. Didn’t seem to work very well in Boston.
Manufacturing a bureaucratic termite mound ala the Info-Fiefdom != “TO SECURE THESE RIGHTS, governments are instituted among men”
People are forgetting that this government has identified Tea Partiers, gun control advocates and other conservatives as “terrorists”. When we read that the phone spying efforts were aimed at rooting out terrorists and their networks, I do not think that the government thinks that “terrorist” means what we think it means. I think that they wanted to monitor US calling patterns to identify conservatives and their allies.
I have seen it at least twice I can remember, but no since about 1982 maybe. I liked it better than Wargames or other computer conspiracy movies.
TCM needs to pull it out and show it.
“declare Martial Law, at which point, check mate for them”
Finally I would get to use some of the ammo I am hoarding.
I think at this point we will win. Moderates and some dims will become scared enough to realize they screwed us. NObama using any massive suppression force will seal him doom.
A short history of Echelon, the grandparent of Prism:
http://echelononline.free.fr/documents/dc/inside_echelon.htm
The world’s most secret electronic surveillance system has its main origin in the conflicts of the Second World War. In a deeper sense, it results from the invention of radio and the fundamental nature of telecommunications. The creation of radio permitted governments and other communicators to pass messages to receivers over transcontinental distances. But there was a penalty - anyone else could listen in. Previously, written messages were physically secure (unless the courier carrying them was ambushed, or a spy compromised communications). The invention of radio thus created a new importance for cryptography, the art and science of making secret codes. It also led to the business of signals intelligence, now an industrial scale activity.
Although the largest surveillance network is run by the US NSA, it is far from alone. Russia, China, France and other nations operate worldwide networks. Dozens of advanced nations use sigint as a key source of intelligence. Even smaller European nations such as Denmark, the Netherlands or Switzerland have recently constructed small, Echelon-like stations to obtain and process intelligence by eavesdropping on civil satellite communications.
During the 20th century, governments realised the importance of effective secret codes. But they were often far from successful. During the Second World War, huge allied codebreaking establishments in Britain and America analysed and read hundreds of thousands of German and Japanese signals. What they did and how they did it remained a cloely-guarded secret for decades afterwards. In the intervening period, the US and British sigint agencies, NSA and Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) constructed their worldwide listening network.
The system was established under a secret 1947 “UKUSA Agreement,” which brought together the British and American systems, personnel and stations. To this was soon joined the networks of three British commonwealth countries, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Later, other countries including Norway, Denmark, Germany and Turkey signed secret sigint agreements with the United States and became “third parties” participants in the UKUSA network.
Besides integrating their stations, each country appoints senior officials to work as liaison staff at the others’ headquarters. The United States operates a Special US Liaison Office (SUSLO) in London and Cheltenham, while a SUKLO official from GCHQ has his own suite of offices inside NSA headquarters at Fort Meade, between Washington and Baltimore.
Under the UKUSA agreement, the five main English-speaking countries took responsibility for overseeing surveillance in different parts of the globe . Britain’s zone included Africa and Europe, east to the Ural Mountains of the former USSR; Canada covered northern latitudes and polar regions; Australia covered Oceania. The agreement prescribed common procedures, targets, equipment and methods that the sigint agencies would use.
Among them were international regulations for sigint security , which required that before anyone was admitted to knowledge of the arrangements for obtaining and handling sigint, they must first undertake a lifelong commitment to secrecy.
Every individual joining a UKUSA sigint organisation must be “indoctrinated” and, often “re-indoctrinated” each time they are admitted to knowledge of a specific project. They are told only what they “need to know”, and that the need for total secrecy about their work “never ceases”.
Shhhhhhh....you are obviously referring to the ammo the recent floods washed down the river, right?
Yes and the ones the recent tornadoes blew away, but I figure that they probably already know about me so what is the point.
Any one who says this is OK should have all their data released to the public immediately; starting with Mr and Mrs Obama.
Touche’...guess we are beyond “Bring It”.
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