| |
| ▲ | mikeyouse a day ago | parent | next [-] | | Unfortunately Binney has absolutely lost it and can’t be considered credible.. literally hanging out with Alex Jones and talking about Stolen elections using math a
precocious middle schooler could rebut. His pinned Tweet is still referencing a “directed energy weapon” assassination attempt of him by the US Air Force (which took place during the Trump administration, who he was supporting, so apparently some rogue DEW plane or deep state operative?) | | |
| ▲ | timschmidt a day ago | parent [-] | | Every human has ideas and opinions others disagree with. However, as Technical Director and later geopolitical world Technical Director of NSA with over 30 years of SIGINT service, literally no one is in a better position to know about NSA surveillance activities. |
| |
| ▲ | jeffbee 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | This is the correct point of reference, but you are misinterpreting it and I urge you to think about it again. All of the government's facilities put together amount to almost nothing in the data center landscape, therefore it should be quite obvious that they certainly are not equipped to broadly intercept, store, and search "everything". | | |
| ▲ | timschmidt 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | "A former senior U.S. intelligence agent described Alexander's program: "Rather than look for a single needle in the haystack, his approach was, 'Let's collect the whole haystack. Collect it all, tag it, store it ... And whatever it is you want, you go searching for it."" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_B._Alexander#NSA_appoint... | | |
| ▲ | ginush 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Yes, and this is the only feasible approach given the huge technical advances in communications over the past few decades. | |
| ▲ | jeffbee 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | What you're describing is a program from 20 years ago design to surveil limited parties in a limited geographic region overseas, during a war, in a place that enjoyed Stone Age information systems. That is not in the sense that the people in this discussion meant by blanket surveillance. They are talking about broad interception of all communications by U.S. persons, an undertaking that it should be obvious to you if you are in this industry would be economically if not thermodynamically impossible. | | |
| ▲ | timschmidt 2 days ago | parent [-] | | "After 9/11, they took one of the programs I had done, or the backend part of it, and started to use it to spy on everybody in this country. That was a program I created called Stellar Wind. That was seperate and compartmented from the regular activity which was ongoing because it was doing domestic spying. All the equipment was coming in, I knew something was happening but then when the contractors I had hired came and told me what they were doing, it was clear where all the hardware was going and what they were using it to do. It was simply a different input, instead of being foreign it was domestic." - William Binney https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=590cy1biewc | | |
| ▲ | jeffbee 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Civilian information systems have radically expanded in size since 2001, even if we take that ancient statement at face value. In the year 2025 it's crazy to believe that every newspaper is shouting that civilian information systems are destabilizing the national power grid and drying up the water table, but the government possesses a larger, far more capable information system that paradoxically has no observable physical presence. | | |
| ▲ | timschmidt 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | "The Utah Data Center (UDC), also known as the Intelligence Community Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative Data Center, is a data storage facility for the United States Intelligence Community that is designed to store data estimated to be on the order of exabytes or larger." "The structure provides 1 to 1.5 million sq ft (93,000 to 139,000 m2), with 100,000 sq ft (9,300 m2) of data center space and more than 900,000 sq ft (84,000 m2) of technical support and administrative space." "The completed facility is expected to require 65 megawatts of electricity, costing about $40 million per year. Given its open-evaporation-based cooling system, the facility is expected to use 1.7 million US gal (6,400 m3) of water per day. An article by Forbes estimates the storage capacity as between 3 and 12 exabytes as of 2013, based on analysis of unclassified blueprints, but mentions Moore's Law, meaning that advances in technology could be expected to increase the capacity by orders of magnitude in the coming years." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center | | |
| ▲ | LargoLasskhyfv a day ago | parent | next [-] | | There was an interesting connection I discovered once. The NSA's UDC is located here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluffdale,_Utah Then there was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC which was located here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Fork,_Utah Open the two location articles in tabs, scroll down a little until you see the maps, or rather have them in good view, and then switch between them, fast, back and forth. See what I mean? There was more, but I don't have it ready ATM(storage long lost), and am too tired to research it again(reading many ugly government and business sites) but, shortly after it was officially known where that datacenter would be built, Millenniata (M-Disc) opened shop there. I can't recall exactly anymore ATM, they may have incorporated smaller, elsewhere, near there, but the move to the final location came shortly after public/official knowledge of where that data center would be built. Ain't that funny? :-) Edit: Got another one, but probably unrelated because of the timeframe, but interesting nonetheless. Very advanced and fast flash storage(for the time, and in some aspects still, like retention time and durability). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lehi,_Utah where one of IM-Flash's(Joint Venture of Intel & Micron) factories was/is located (sold to Texas Instruments, producing other stuff now). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IM_Flash_Technologies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_XPoint | |
| ▲ | jeffbee 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Exactly. That is a toy-sized data center. It would fit in the janitor's closet of a real data center. | | |
| |
| ▲ | LargoLasskhyfv a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | Maybe just the metadata, of which phone-number calls which other when and where? Who messages whom by email, messenger, whatever, when and where? For the graph of communications over time, with interesting nodes appearing, showing emerging clusters around them, whose members then could be targeted by other means? |
|
|
|
| |
| ▲ | AstroNutt a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | Why should they when they have access to FAANG? No need for massive data centers. |
|
|
| |
| ▲ | ginush 2 days ago | parent [-] | | No it doesn't. Think about it. Some computer somewhere that is involved in bulk interception happens to record your browser connecting to, say, the Hacker News website, at various dates and times. This is stored in a dataset. No-one ever views these connection records. No-one ever writes a query for the dataset that returns these connection records. These connection records are automatically deleted after the retention period is up. Clearly, you are not being surveilled. | | |
| ▲ | DennisP 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | So your claim is that this massive data collection, done at massive public expense, is not used at all? That seems unlikely. And given how good computers are at natural language processing these days, the data is more usable than ever. | | |
| ▲ | ginush 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Of course it is used. But unless you're a target of interest to intelligence analysts, the metadata generated by your online activities will be of no interest whatsoever. It won't even be looked at. | | |
| ▲ | DennisP 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | The whole point of mass data collection is that you can check everyone to see if they should be targets of interest. And as societies get more totalitarian, what qualifies you to be a target becomes less and less dramatic. Doing this is easy these days. You keep using phrases like "looked at" as if humans had to manually read through the records. | |
| ▲ | sunaookami a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | It leads to a Chilling Effect which has a huge negative impact on society. |
|
| |
| ▲ | Larrikin 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Analytics are mining the data on here every second. Hacker News is a wildly popular site with higher ups in major Fortune 500 company posting anonymously and publicly here. Say anything bad about a major country's government (or even a minor country like Israel or Palestine) and all kinds of accounts you've never seen before start defending and attacking. Everything you are saying is being actively monitored at this point on every major website even if you don't believe it's negatively affecting you yet | | |
| ▲ | ginush 2 days ago | parent [-] | | An analyst who is tasked with investigating, say, terrorist threats, is not going to be remotely interested in the browsing habits of random people who pose no threat whatsoever. It's just pure paranoia. Yes, we know bulk interception is being done by intelligence agencies. No, they're not watching you. They have more important things to be getting on with. | | |
| |
| ▲ | 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | nhhvhy 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | I thought about it, and now I’m even more convinced we are being surveilled. |
|
|
