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5 Sneaky Ways The NSA Spies On Americans
The U.S. National Security Agency remains at the center of controversy this summer, nine weeks after The Guardian and the Washington Post broke the news about its PRISM online data-mining program. While the many additional spying scandals that have come to light since then have all been technically legal, they’re really weird—because the NSA’s actual job is to monitor foreign communications.
How does the agency rationalize its spying on U.S. citizens? Here are five tricky justifications.
1. The NSA plays “three degrees of Kevin Bacon.”
When the NSA has a suspect, it can collect information three degrees away from that person. This means it can look at the suspects’ phone records, the phone records of everyone the suspect called (1 degree), the phone records of everyone they called (2 degrees), and finally the phone records of everyone they called (3 degrees).
The justification: Terrorists are probably friends with other terrorists.
The result: The NSA can cast a crazy broad net! This reporter has 260 contacts in his phone book. Assuming all my contacts have about that many people as well, one degree away is 67,000 people. Two degrees? 17,576,000 folks. By three degrees, the NSA could have collected phone records on 4,569,760,000. That’s, um, billions. It’s unlikely the NSA is actually collecting this information, but a limit of three degrees from a suspect is no limit at all.
2. The NSA hides behind metadata.
The voice part of phone calls is strictly protected legally. The metadata, or peripheral information of a call, isn’t. This includes the number dialed, the number doing the calling, the duration of the call, and, if applicable, the cell tower that picked up the signal. These data points are all deemed the property of the telephone company that carries the call.
The justification: The NSA can use this legally available information to quickly catch criminals. Most recently, the agency collected this data from Verizon right after the April 19 bombings at the Boston Marathon.
The result: Your phone company is legally obligated to hand your phone records (which can be surprisingly revealing) over to the government when it asks.
For the ultimate in privacy click here.
The united states citizenry are being dry raped.
The administrations brilliance is evident in the fact that we are arguing whether there is lube available that could have been used instead.