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To: Reily
The processing and manpower to spy on every individual conversation aka 1984 style is beyond the realm of even NSA.

Stated as broadly as that? No, they wouldn't have the manpower to do that. But...

The Secret Sharer

Even in an age in which computerized feats are commonplace, the N.S.A.’s capabilities are breathtaking. The agency reportedly has the capacity to intercept and download, every six hours, electronic communications equivalent to the contents of the Library of Congress. Three times the size of the C.I.A., and with a third of the U.S.’s entire intelligence budget, the N.S.A. has a five-thousand-acre campus at Fort Meade protected by iris scanners and facial-recognition devices. The electric bill there is said to surpass seventy million dollars a year.

(snip)

Drake, hoping to help fight back against Al Qaeda, immediately thought of a tantalizing secret project he had come across while working on Jackpot. Code-named ThinThread, it had been developed by technological wizards in a kind of Skunk Works on the N.S.A. campus.

(snip)

Binney expressed terrible remorse over the way some of his algorithms were used after 9/11. ThinThread, the “little program” that he invented to track enemies outside the U.S., “got twisted,” and was used for both foreign and domestic spying: “I should apologize to the American people. It’s violated everyone’s rights. It can be used to eavesdrop on the whole world.”

(snip)

In the late nineties, Binney estimated that there were some two and a half billion phones in the world and one and a half billion I.P. addresses. Approximately twenty terabytes of unique information passed around the world every minute. Binney started assembling a system that could trap and map all of it. “I wanted to graph the world,” Binney said. “People said, ‘You can’t do this—the possibilities are infinite.’ ” But he argued that “at any given point in time the number of atoms in the universe is big, but it’s finite.”

As Binney imagined it, ThinThread would correlate data from financial transactions, travel records, Web searches, G.P.S. equipment, and any other “attributes” that an analyst might find useful in pinpointing “the bad guys.” By 2000, Binney, using fibre optics, had set up a computer network that could chart relationships among people in real time. It also turned the N.S.A.’s data-collection paradigm upside down. Instead of vacuuming up information around the world and then sending it all back to headquarters for analysis, ThinThread processed information as it was collected—discarding useless information on the spot and avoiding the overload problem that plagued centralized systems. Binney says, “The beauty of it is that it was open-ended, so it could keep expanding.”

A small excerpt from a ten page article. Keep in mind that the software he is talking about is now several years old. No "eyes on" manpower needed until this "super" computer spits out a file on a "suspect."

117 posted on 08/25/2012 9:22:05 AM PDT by TigersEye (dishonorabledisclosure.com - OPSEC (give them support))
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 113 | View Replies ]


To: TigersEye
there are things in the article that makes me very suspicious that Binney was NOT what he publicly says he was and did!

and that's all I am going to say!

123 posted on 08/25/2012 10:17:39 AM PDT by Reily
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 117 | View Replies ]

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