Former CIA and NSA employee source of intelligence leaks

[Syt]

[Tamas]

I would label myself a "liberal" but in Europe that means "socialist who want to pose as liberal", so it is not really an option.

[The Minsky Moment]

Why would the gag rule bother libertarians?  It's restricts the powers of the federal government?

It restricts speech.

It also extended to the effective prohibition of sending of abolitionist material through the mails, at least in the South.  Federal postmasters were required to refuse to deliver pamphlets are mail containing abolitionist views.

[Razgovory]

Why would the gag rule bother libertarians?  It's restricts the powers of the federal government?

It restricts speech.

It also extended to the effective prohibition of sending of abolitionist material through the mails, at least in the South.  Federal postmasters were required to refuse to deliver pamphlets are mail containing abolitionist views.

Of of government employees and statists.

[Razgovory]

Instead of arguing with me about it, go send some letters to the Von Mises institute.

[derspiess]

You're funny, Uncle Hat.

[The Minsky Moment]

Instead of arguing with me about it, go send some letters to the Von Mises institute.

They are even more impervious to reason.

[DGuller]

Instead of arguing with me about it, go send some letters to the Von Mises institute.

They are even more impervious to reason.

[Syt]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2013/jun/21/gchq-cables-secret-world-communications-nsa

Britain's spy agency GCHQ has secretly gained access to the network of cables which carry the world's phone calls and internet traffic and has started to process vast streams of sensitive personal information which it is sharing with its American partner, the National Security Agency (NSA).

The sheer scale of the agency's ambition is reflected in the titles of its two principal components: Mastering the Internet and Global Telecoms Exploitation, aimed at scooping up as much online and telephone traffic as possible. This is all being carried out without any form of public acknowledgement or debate.

One key innovation has been GCHQ's ability to tap into and store huge volumes of data drawn from fibre-optic cables for up to 30 days so that it can be sifted and analysed. That operation, codenamed Tempora, has been running for some 18 months.

GCHQ and the NSA are consequently able to access and process vast quantities of communications between entirely innocent people, as well as targeted suspects.

This includes recordings of phone calls, the content of email messages, entries on Facebook and the history of any internet user's access to websites – all of which is deemed legal, even though the warrant system was supposed to limit interception to a specified range of targets.

The existence of the programme has been disclosed in documents shown to the Guardian by the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden as part of his attempt to expose what he has called "the largest programme of suspicionless surveillance in human history".

"It's not just a US problem. The UK has a huge dog in this fight," Snowden told the Guardian. "They [GCHQ] are worse than the US."

However, on Friday a source with knowledge of intelligence argued that the data was collected legally under a system of safeguards, and had provided material that had led to significant breakthroughs in detecting and preventing serious crime.

Britain's technical capacity to tap into the cables that carry the world's communications – referred to in the documents as special source exploitation – has made GCHQ an intelligence superpower.

By 2010, two years after the project was first trialled, it was able to boast it had the "biggest internet access" of any member of the Five Eyes electronic eavesdropping alliance, comprising the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

UK officials could also claim GCHQ "produces larger amounts of metadata than NSA". (Metadata describes basic information on who has been contacting whom, without detailing the content.)

By May last year 300 analysts from GCHQ, and 250 from the NSA, had been assigned to sift through the flood of data.

The Americans were given guidelines for its use, but were told in legal briefings by GCHQ lawyers: "We have a light oversight regime compared with the US".

When it came to judging the necessity and proportionality of what they were allowed to look for, would-be American users were told it was "your call".

The Guardian understands that a total of 850,000 NSA employees and US private contractors with top secret clearance had access to GCHQ databases.

The documents reveal that by last year GCHQ was handling 600m "telephone events" each day, had tapped more than 200 fibre-optic cables and was able to process data from at least 46 of them at a time.

[...]

As the probes began to generate data, GCHQ set up a three-year trial at the GCHQ station in Bude, Cornwall. By the summer of 2011, GCHQ had probes attached to more than 200 internet links, each carrying data at 10 gigabits a second. "This is a massive amount of data!" as one internal slideshow put it. That summer, it brought NSA analysts into the Bude trials. In the autumn of 2011, it launched Tempora as a mainstream programme, shared with the Americans.

The intercept probes on the transatlantic cables gave GCHQ access to its special source exploitation. Tempora allowed the agency to set up internet buffers so it could not simply watch the data live but also store it – for three days in the case of content and 30 days for metadata.

"Internet buffers represent an exciting opportunity to get direct access to enormous amounts of GCHQ's special source data," one document explained.

The processing centres apply a series of sophisticated computer programmes in order to filter the material through what is known as MVR – massive volume reduction. The first filter immediately rejects high-volume, low-value traffic, such as peer-to-peer downloads, which reduces the volume by about 30%. Others pull out packets of information relating to "selectors" – search terms including subjects, phone numbers and email addresses of interest. Some 40,000 of these were chosen by GCHQ and 31,000 by the NSA. Most of the information extracted is "content", such as recordings of phone calls or the substance of email messages. The rest is metadata.

The GCHQ documents that the Guardian has seen illustrate a constant effort to build up storage capacity at the stations at Cheltenham, Bude and at one overseas location, as well a search for ways to maintain the agency's comparative advantage as the world's leading communications companies increasingly route their cables through Asia to cut costs. Meanwhile, technical work is ongoing to expand GCHQ's capacity to ingest data from new super cables carrying data at 100 gigabits a second. As one training slide told new users: "You are in an enviable position – have fun and make the most of it."

[CountDeMoney]

That operation, codenamed Tempora,

How British.

[Syt]

A German article from 2012:

http://www.sueddeutsche.de/digital/datenschutz-geheimdienste-ueberwachten-mehr-als-millionen-e-mails-1.1293275

In 2010, German intelligence agencies scanned 37,000,000 emails and data connections because they contained certain keywords (bomb, atom, missile etc.). Of those 37 million items, 213 contained information that was useful to the agencies (or about 0.0006%).

[Razgovory]

Instead of arguing with me about it, go send some letters to the Von Mises institute.

They are even more impervious to reason.

As some of the chief standard bearers of Libertarianism and defenders of the South I'll take that as a concession.

[Duque de Bragança]

That operation, codenamed Tempora,

How British.

O Tempora, O Mores!

[Valmy]

As some of the chief standard bearers of Libertarianism and defenders of the South I'll take that as a concession.

[Richard Hakluyt]

That operation, codenamed Tempora,

How British.

O Tempora, O Mores!

Heh, just realised that myself a few minutes back.............the latin lessons are lost in the distant past nowadays 

Still, it is nice to know that someone at GCHQ knows how disgusting their behaviour is.