The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the NSA has been monitoring credit card transactions:
It couldn’t be determined if any of the Internet or credit-card arrangements are ongoing, as are the phone company efforts, or one-shot collection efforts. The credit-card firms, phone companies and NSA declined to comment for this article.
Of course it’s ongoing, why wouldn’t it be? And don’t anyone pretend they’re shocked that we’ve shared PRISM data with the UK’s spy services.
schrodinger's cat
Data != Information. Wading through large amounts of data without knowing what you are looking for is
pretty useless.
Mnemosyne
Again, it’s really coming across as people being A-OK with private companies selling information about their credit card transactions to each other for a cash payment, but being shocked — shocked, I say! — when that exact same information is given to the government.
If the problem is privacy, shouldn’t private companies be banned from selling that to one another? Or is the problem that the government is getting it for free, and they should have to pay for it like all the private companies do?
Violet
As usual, Calvin and Hobbes got there first.
BGinCHI
WSJ also reporting gambling activity at Casablanca.
Greenwald points out that this is another name for White House.
John McCain scheduled for Meet the Press.
Liberty60
What I think is interesting is to see the sudden rift developing in the political landscape- the rightwing blogs were outraged yesterday, while today Hugh Hewitt and the WSJ are trotting out the NationInATimeOfWar argument.
kindness
Does the NSA really want to know what I’m buying that much? Jesus, if they are going to be insatiable voyeurs about it the least they could do is tip me some. Pay that bill once in a while NSA. And go smoke that damn ‘after’ cigarette somewhere else.
@Violet: good one. I miss Calvin & Hobbs.
joes527
@schrodinger’s cat: Welcome to 2013. You are correct that he problems of big data haven’t all been solved, but your implication that big data is completely unmanageable has been overtaken by reality.
Go ahead and comfort yourself with the illusion that you can hide in all the click on the internet. Those days are gone.
piratedan
@BGinCHI: dog bites man, film at 11.
Mandalay
Our lying MSM is dutifully lending its support to government policy….
WTF? How can you conclude that the American public “isn’t very concerned” from a poll on public awareness (not approval) taken before the leak? This isn’t sloppy journalism; it’s deliberate lying.
StringOnAStick
My BIL has a sort-of MI militia “friend” who posts about his “trainings” on the book of faces and has credit card debt to Venus, plus of course a long history of sending out blast emails of the most insane and racist anti-Obama screeds. That his kids want for decent food and clothing while he expands his arsenal is just one feature of his paranoia. I find it entertaining that the stupid bastard figured all this time that his communications were secret…..
Alain
After my (Swiss) father died in 1995, we met in Switzerland with his banker to deal with his assets and were informed that, because of Echelon, the US-UK-CAN-AUS signal intercept program, no electronic communications were considered safe from prying eyes. This was 1995, and with Bush II post-9/11, it got much, much worse.
In 2003, I remember arguing with some very smart computer experts about the fact that yes, they were sweeping up huge amounts of data, but there was no way to analyze it. It was pointed out that the NSA had recently gotten a patent for a holographic data retrieval system that dealt with multi-GBs paging and such, just the kind of thing you’d need to have to analyze the TBs of data coming in every day!
If this was then, and Moore’s law and such hold, you can be damned sure that the tens of thousands of new NSA hires during the aughts weren’t just hired to use then-current technology, but were designing the systems necessary for TIA.
Emma
I just keep wondering how the hell they’re sorting through all that trivial crud to arrive at… what? Something? Either they have some very sophisticated data sifting programs around or there are going to be a rash of suicides at the NSA from people just being bored out of their minds.
Ted & Hellen
It is fucking racist as hell to question this, Mistermix. Frankly, I am surprised at you.
Cacti
The President shared intelligence information with an important foreign ally?
Is there no end to the man’s monstrosity?
schrodinger's cat
@joes527: Computational power has increased,yes, but human beings still come up with the algorithms and write code.
Also too, Google knows what you do online, the credit card companies know what you spend, the cat is already out of the bag.
Cacti
@Alain:
Won’t anyone think of the repositories of Nazi loot and world-wide haven for tax evaders?
Ted & Hellen
@Mnemosyne:
BECAUSE CORPORATIONS DO A SUCK ASS THING IT IS TOTALLY COOL THAT THE GOVERNMENT DO LIKEWISE.
There really is no Bot shape into which you will not twist yourself in defending Himself.
This configuration looks particularly excruciating, however, so I’ll make allowances for that one bleeding pustule near your lady part and award a 9.7
FlipYrWhig
@Emma: I thought the idea was that they stored a bunch of stuff, then after something bad happens, the ensuing investigation makes use of the bunch of stuff. As opposed to using the bunch of stuff to predict or anticipate something bad happening.
Emma
@Ted & Hellen: Is there one single ugliness you will not lower yourself to? One single thing you will not do in order to make yourself feel like the biggest fish in a tiny pond? Jesus, man, if nothing else, try to preserve your identity as a human being.
Face
What exactly are they monitoring for? Purchases of C4? Do dumbasses really use plastic for plastic explosives? Unless the NSA wants some ideas for birthday gifts, I’m not sure how the perusal of 50 kajillion terabytes of CC purchase data will catch domestic turr’writs.
joes527
@schrodinger’s cat: Of course you’re right. Privacy is an illusion. Get over it. GWB was just a little ahead of his time.
schrodinger's cat
Romney never released his tax returns did he? Wonder what was in them.
Emma
@FlipYrWhig: Well, then, they’re doing it wrong. In the counter-terrorism game it’s prevention that counts.
roc
@Mnemosyne: Google isn’t the Government. For all the things they can and actually do to annoy people and make their lives difficult, they can’t drag anyone into a court, or suspend their citizenship and detain them indefinitely, or otherwise turn their lives upside down in some political witch hunt.
e.g. Plenty of private people ‘knew’ who associated with communists back in the 50s. Or those who associated with civil rights groups or anti-war groups in the 60s and 70s. And some of that negatively impacted people just in the private sphere. But that information only ruined lives when agents of the government used them as a club for political purposes.
And if you don’t see the gaggle of congress-critters who’d use this giant pile of data collected via PRISM, FISA warrants, etc, to do the same the same damn thing today, for petty personal political gain, you’re not paying attention. This is among the worst times, among the worst Congresses, for the Government to be in control of this sort of data. Not that they ever really should, but I can’t imagine riskier circumstances for normal people, short of situations that would Godwin the thread.
Comrade Dread
Sigh…
Yes, it does stink that the government can legally do this. No, this is not surprising to anyone who was paying attention to the Patriot Act which was passed and renewed bipartisanly, or to anyone who figured out the jig was up when Congress bipartisanly passed immunity for telecomms who were giving all this info to the government before it was fully legal; or really to anyone who has any experience with the Internet where it is a given rule that privacy does not truly exist.
What really annoys me about all of this are the media and those in Congress who after supporting and passing (respectively) legislation that gave the government all of the power to do this to ‘keep us safe’, are now throwing hissy fits because the government is doing the exact thing that they empowered it to do.
Sweet f***ing Buddha… I picked the wrong week to stop drinking.
So now we get the fauxrage from everyone, except the civil libertarians who get to be morally righteous for having been outraged at the right time and will spend no small amount of time telling us how right they were, but nothing ultimately will get done because despite all of the fauxrage, Congress overwhelmingly supported making all of this legal.
MomSense
If only the NSA had a TROLLBEGONE program.
Ted & Hellen
@schrodinger’s cat:
No, there is nothing. Thanks for asking.
But having regularly been called the most vile names known to humankind here on this blog, especially by the target of the comment above to which I assume you refer; and having been wished the most excruciating forms of death and torture as well, I don’t really concern myself with the niceties about which you are pretending to be concerned.
Your poutrage, as always, is very selectively applied.
Cacti
“The President has lost all credibility”
-New York based publication that gave a loving tongue bath to the sphincter of the last POTUS while he ginned up a phony war.
cleek
@Emma:
they’re not sifting. there’s too much data for that.
more likely, the FBI – or whoever – gets a lead on someone and asks the NSA to start looking at what connects to that person. they build a set of links to and from that person and see if there’s anything interesting.
or, certain purchases trigger searches for other purchases: a person bought a ton of fertilizer, did he also buy 55 gallons of diesel fuel, and a rental van? FLAG.
repeated phone calls to al-Q HQ would probably set off an alarm, too.
Mandalay
@mistermix:
Your link doesn’t work. MI6 is onto your subversive activities and fighting back.
I expect that Daniel Craig will strangle you with your shower curtain in the next day or two.
StringOnAStick
@Liberty60: The RW blogs being pissed is to be expected, as is the WSJ and the bloggers/writers who are on the wingnut gravy train being all “hold your horses, this is all to save Mom and Apple Pie!”. The latter know where the wingnut welfare comes from, and the surveillance state pays very, very well. Time to calm the rabble before it upsets the flow of money.
Personally, I think someone inside the borg decided to leak simply because the President stated that it was time to cut back on the war on terror. They did so with the hope of further hamstringing Obama, and perhaps as a warning that some things are too large and powerful to be messed with, but mostly to make sure those contracts and $ keep flowing. Bush, with the help of congress, opened the floodgates; those making bank and increasing their power on the endless wartime footing aren’t exactly going to quietly step aside because the president is starting to think this thing needs to be reined in before it is too late*.
*we passed that point long ago, and it wasn’t under this president.
Jack the Second
The unfortunate thing is that the useful information is really hard to extract (“The cluster of transactions from these three individuals over the last four years indicates they are planning a terrorist plan…”), but all of the embarrassing information is really easy to extract (“One transaction to an adult bookstore/website/escort? CHECKMATE!”).
peach flavored shampoo
A bit off topic, but dont patents have to be in the public domain? Did the super secretive NSA really publically patent a system such as this? Seems odd to me that a spy agency patents anything.
Feudalism Now!
Remember in Seven when Morgan Freeman gains library lending records from the FBI and had to keep it on the QT? It seems so quaint now. I remember all the outrage when the Patriot Act was first put together and again when it was renewed… Oh wait there wasn’t. This was all predicted as possible when these laws were crafted. This was the worst government secret in the world. They came out and said we are going to spy on you and now people are shocked that they did. Maybe there is something different about this president doing it? The Demon- crat affiliation? His excellent tan? His ability to speak English?
schrodinger's cat
deleted
Jon O
Ugh, this is just not okay.
Let’s say hypothetically Rick Santorum or Paul Ryan gets elected Prez in 2016. It could happen! Let’s say his cabinet – purely hypothetically – includes a cadre of Koch-friendly conservative heavies. Let’s say – purely hypothetically – that our Congress and FISA courts are entirely disinclined to impede any of this data collection. What precisely do we think will stop the gov’t from acting on information like this? Learning a little more than they should about the financial health of their enemies or pecadilloes of Democratic rivals? Releasing that info to an access-hungry media? Looking to entrap over some legal uncrossed t or undotted i?
I’m not comfortable with ANYBODY having this info. I’ve acquiesced to giving it to Google etc because frankly, I don’t have a say in the matter. Also, they can’t target me for legal action. I can’t say the same thing for the government, especially given that it will not always be our government.
Poopyman
@BGinCHI: (Golf claps)
PaulW
@Feudalism Now!:
It’s not the fact that they’re spying but the scope, and the lack of transparency or accountability. And it’s not this President, this has been an issue since Bush the Lesser, and it’s an issue under Obama, and it’s gonna be an issue for whoever gets into the White House in 2016 (me me me! Wait, I gotta get my name in first…).
If we’re gonna have a scandal this summer, it might as well be over something that really matters: our privacy, and governmental accountability.
cleek
@Jon O:
it would mean instant impeachment, and jail time for most, if they got caught doing it.
Todd
A query for the screaming meemies – have any of you heard of the crime called “structuring”? How many of you are aware of the obligations of banks to report deposits of $10,000.00 or greater to the comptroller, and how many of you are aware that data regarding bank deposits are routinely audited for evidence of structuring?
What is your expectation of privacy in your relationship with the bank, if you intend to have any meaningful oversight and regulation of banking activity for commercial retail banking?
What, in your mind, makes credit cards different?
Todd
@Mnemosyne:
This.
joes527
@cleek:
This keeps getting repeated, as if repetition would make it true. It ain’t the 70’s any more. I have no knowledge they are doing. But anyone who thinks sifting through very large data sets it technically impossible is fooling themselves. This is not top-secret-tin-foil-hat technology. Big box stores have been using it for years.
Mandalay
@roc:
Well said. The number of brain dead posters here who see no difference between monitoring by google and monitoring by the government is astounding.
Ted & Hellen
@schrodinger’s cat:
Sorry, my own poutrage was aimed at the faux delicate poutrage of the ever sensitive flower EMMA and her snit aimed at me.
Ever so sorry.
Emma
@schrodinger’s cat: He was trying to get me.
Todd
@Cacti:
Free Mumia, man….
piratedan
does this mean if we start having mass purchases of pitchforks, pikes and torches that financial reform could finally be achieved?
Emma
@Jon O: They’re supposedly not in power and it hasn’t stopped them now. They don’t care. And if they’re in power they can rewrite the laws.
joes527
@cleek:
Youre so *cute* when you say things like this. Don’t ever change.
cmorenc
At least those of us outside states with legal marijuana (or at least dispensaries) fly under NSA’s radar with our transactions, since they’re one of the remaining strictly-cash transactions. One of the potential downsides to legalizing marijuana is that this will substantially enhance the government’s ability to know EXACTLY who’s toking up, without need for any drug tests, or even to investigate your medical prescription history. They can simply monitor your credit-card transactions and match them to lists of known mj vendors or dispensaries, since as with other goods, most folks will find purchasing by debit or credit card vastly more convenient than paying cash.
Emma
@Ted & Hellen: That’s teach me. Please proceed.
schrodinger's cat
@Ted & Hellen: Don’t worry about it.
Villago Delenda Est
@Mnemosyne:
Yes, this.
The ship has sailed. The Ferengi are already busy figuring out what you might want to buy and are crafting their advertising accordingly.
Jon O
@cleek: Well, provided the Congress belongs to the opposite party. Do you think GWB could have done anything that would have got him impeached between 2002-2006?
Narcissus
I’m still not sure what the big deal is. I mean, this stuff really, really pissed me off. Back in like 2003-2004 when the whole Total Information Awareness/John Poindexter plan was fucking laid out for everyone to see. I cared then. Most people treated me like a conspiracy nut when I talked about it. So yeah, I was righteously pissed then. And then in the next ten years the government followed that plan to the letter and still nobody gave a shit. Now the Grauniad and the NYT and the Wall Street Times have noticed so everyone is freaking out?
Todd
@roc:
Google can go one even better – they can sell your shit, and do!
LOLAY
Anyway, the other thing that google does is shatters any reasonable expectation of privacy you may have, in accordance with longstanding principles of 4th amendment jurisprudence. You’d think that a constimatooshinal scholar of the caliber of Glenn Greenwald might have remembered to mention that.
Mary
I must say that Geenwald is really rocking it over there at the Guardian. I remember when we razzed him for that stupid joint venture with Jane Hamsher but Greenwald always had gobs of underlying merit and was rightfully forgiven for that mistake.
Cacti
@Todd:
Continuing on that theme, every time you make a retail transaction, the contents of your cart are in common view, and frequently recorded on store surveillance. When you swipe your credit or debit card, your purchase information is recorded by retailers and used for future targeted advertising.
After voluntarily surrendering all of the above information for collection, storage, or future reference, complaints about privacy ring a bit hollow.
Liberty60
I’m trying to figure out how this will all shake out, politically.
Reading the Wingnutopia blogs, there are a lot gruding admiration comments for Greenwald, and noises about civil liberties (copious references to watering the tree of liberty).
Yet the Establishment conservative voices are providing cover fire for the NSA.
Liberals are angry, but resigned, since we were talking about this years ago.
Since nearly everyone in Congress has their fingerprints all over this, I don’t see it becoming an issue in 2014.
But who knows? Given politicians nearly miraculous gymnastic ability to oppose something they praised yesterday, we could see a civil liberty alliance of different stripes.
It all seems to depend on which way the winds of opinion are going to blow- I doubt that very many people are really surprised, but now that the fear of Terra has receded, concern about privacy might be more important.
Maude
@Mnemosyne:
Check out warranties on things. Some of the companies sell your info. People aren’t screaming about this.
Mandalay
@PaulW:
This is exactly the core issue. If the government wants to monitor our electronic activities then draft a law, push it through Congress, and vote on it. Voters will see who approved the monitoring and who rejected it. The government will be accountable, and its citizens will know exactly what is going on.
The problem is that the Administrations and Congress do not want to tell its citizens what they are up to, under the bogus pretense of “National Security”. So they slink off every three months to get the court to rubber stamp approval so they can continue to monitor us as they see fit, without saying anything about it.
scav
@Liberty60: Swings on a pinwheel too. Hosannahs about Big Data were sung not too long ago after Boston.
joes527
@Narcissus:
Yeah, well some of us were pissed off in 2003, and are disappointed that the program didn’t change a dot in 2008.
But to notice that is to say that both sides do it and wish GWB would eat all the babies in the country or something like that.
cleek
@joes527:
believe me, i know all about big data. everyone in the field is familiar with my employer.
but all of the call records and all of the CC transactions and all internet activity, etc, etc, etc, in the US is HUGE data.
Suffern ACE
This is one of those things where I don’t know if I’d be happier to know that the government found a reason to look at me and discarded me or if having my name announced in court as a suspcicious fellow under investigation would be better. I might come down on the side of secret investigations because the net may be wide here.
cleek
@Mandalay:
they did that. it’s called USA PATRIOT.
Cacti
@Todd:
Too many libruls still haven’t learned.
When the GOP-friendly media screams “Jump!”, the correct answer is “Fuck you!” not “How high?”.
And yes, GOP-friendly media includes Bushbot/Paultard, Glenn Greenwald.
rea
@Mandalay: .”The number of brain dead posters here who see no difference between monitoring by google and monitoring by the government is astounding.”
The first issue, from the constitutional point of view, is whetehr you have a reasonable expectation of privacy in this information. You don’t have much of a reasonable expectation of privacy in information known only to you, your credit card company, your ISP and Google.
KXB
It is hard for me to get share in the outrage, at this point. Our little company collects data all the time, we have caller ID on our phones to let us know who is calling, before that we had *69 to call back someone who did not leave a message. We monitor IP addresses to see which regions of the country look at our website at what time of day.
That governments and private sectors monitor communications is like your parents having sex – you know it happens, you just don’t want to know.
What organizations do with the info is far more important. If a family is planning a trip overseas, and the words Iran are used in the wrong way – will that person be the target for a bogus prosecution? That is what concerns me.
joes527
@Cacti: All that matters is the fight. Evidently, it is all we have left.
Bill Arnold
@Todd:
Credit card transactions are generally (almost always) much smaller than $10000, so I don’t understand your point. (I”m assuming transactions where the recipients are clearly different entities.)
(Are you saying that $10000 is just a number, and so is $1? There is a qualitative difference; in one case most people are not surveiled, and in the other, most people are.)
Comrade Jake
@Emma:
It’s the former. They have access to some of the best mathematical minds at NSA, and then some.
MikeBoyScout
Well, thank goodness we “won” the Cold War against the “Evil Empire” because we all know the USSR see pied on its own citizens. FREEEEDOMZ!
nemesis
@joes527: But anyone who thinks sifting through very large data sets it technically impossible is fooling themselves.
Why would the NSA and others bother with gathering the data if they couldnt do anything with it? One must assume given the limited facts we have, that the so-called sifting of data has become much more effecient, effective and routine. Plus, as the drilling down on data improves, old data can be re-filtered.
My curiosity is peaked. Why did this leak now? Gotta be about $, right?
schrodinger's cat
No front page post on GOP’s latest outreach effort to Latino and other immigrants?
Matt McIrvin
@cleek:
Really? Suppose they can somehow frame the activity as anti-terrorist? There’s ample evidence that there’s a way to spin just about anything that way.
I’m still trying to figure out if this is the public/media finally getting sick of the War On Terror trumping all civil-liberties concerns, or if it’s just a way to split the left and get Obama so Republicans can get in, at which point some terrorist threat or other will make it all magically OK again.
Villago Delenda Est
@Ted & Hellen:
You’ve earned them, racist scum.
max
@Mnemosyne: Again, it’s really coming across as people being A-OK with private companies selling information about their credit card transactions to each other for a cash payment, but being shocked — shocked, I say! — when that exact same information is given to the government.
Hey, I thought they should ban the fucking practice – for private companies too.
If the problem is privacy, shouldn’t private companies be banned from selling that to one another? Or is the problem that the government is getting it for free, and they should have to pay for it like all the private companies do?
I think they should all go fuck themselves. (And what Alain said, and what Comrade Dread said.) This stuff is a threat to the people of the United States, a much bigger threat than Al Qaeda, and ought to be gotten rid of. And if Congress cannot bring itself to adhere to plain meaning of the Constitution in their quest for safety from the blowback of their idiot policies, then they ought to be unelected en masse and fucking replaced by someone with some fucking respect for the law.
(Partisan affiliation has got nothing to do with this, excepting that lots of elected Republicans love this shit and fuck them. And fuck the Democrats that support those assholes.)
max
[‘That is all.’]
catclub
@Todd: I disagree. I think supplying that data to the government is a profit center. Heck, the government probably pays for the infrastructure so that the sales to other private companies are pure profit.
Suffern ACE
@rea: Yeah. Is this data like sending a letter in the mail or is it like walking down main street wearing a placard.
Redshirt
Privacy is a relic of the pre-digital past. It’s gone and is never coming back as long as we use these technologies.
Todd
@Bill Arnold:
What is your reasonable expectation of privacy (again, the longstanding catchphrase of fourth amendment jurisprudence) in a transaction which has required that information has been divulged to the retailer or service provider which got paid by you, the merchant processor, your bank, the Comptroller of the Currency in routine data audits, Transunion and Experian? And how about the addition of your card issuer’s “valued partners”, which you agreed to release information to at the time you applied for and activated your card?
Abe Ced
I don’t know what you all are bitching about. Obama is still the “lesser evil”, isn’t he? He’s just as much not-Romney as he was when you re-elected him. That was all you needed, apparently. And that’s all you got.
catclub
@cleek: “instant impeachment” Ha ha. I am confident that Dick Cheney used it, or better yet, just the threat that he knew things, to keep people like Jane Harmon in line.
A fabulous tool for manipulating members of congress.
JPL
Pharmacies sell your prescription information to pharmaceuticals manufacturers, who then reward the doctor who prescribed it to you. For the most part, you can opt out of emails when ordering something.
Mandalay
@cleek:
No., All that did was to make the government’s secret monitoring legal. There is no accountability.
We need Congress to draft a bill that states what the government wants to monitor and why.
bcinaz
My outrage meter must be broken. Or I’ve been watching too much NCIS. It’s just so surprising how surprised everybody seems to be. Tracking by merchants via search algorithms, by grocery stores and airlines via loyalty cards, banks via credit cards, health via insurance, employment status via unemployment, who-knows-what via drug testing, and everything else with your SSN. Seems to me we’ve been living in the surveillance state for a long long time. And privacy has been a myth for a long, long time.
Matt McIrvin
@Cacti: Nah, I think this is why, for all his annoying behavior, we still need Greenwald.
None of these recent revelations have been remotely surprising to me; it’s what happens when you pass the Patriot Act, but they are evidently surprising to a lot of people, which is itself a problem and is why there has to be somebody yelling about it.
If hatred of Obama can get Republicans upset about actual executive overreach and laws that hand them all the keys, well, maybe that’s not all bad. Obama’s been reelected and is term-limited; policy is not necessarily about defending his personal honor any more. If the heat actually causes him to change policies, which I think is not outside the realm of possibility, that would be even better! The danger is just that it’s still OK if you are a Republican.
Villago Delenda Est
OK, all this data is being collected. That much is a given. It was being collected by both public and private interests before Rep. Kotex’s Patriot Act was voted into law.
The question becomes, as others have pointed out, what is done with it? Corporations use it to figure out what we’re interested in buying…and to sell it to others who might be interested in selling us their crap.
Governments use it to look for patterns that might indicate some sort of violent activity that they want to prevent.
The problem THEN becomes when those dumbass humans get involved and draw conclusions from the data that may or may not have anything to do with reality, both public and private.
piratedan
@schrodinger’s cat: i linked to LGF twice yesterday regarding the same thing in open threads, nary a nibble.
muddy
I’ve told this on BJ before: there’s this guy I know who thinks he is/pretends to be a “severe” Libertarian, who of course votes R not L. When they passed the Patriot Act, he thought it was just fine that the gov’t check your phone calls, if you’re innocent etc, he’s not a “raghead terrorist”. I grew up in the Middle East. I told this guy that whenever I spoke to someone from backwhen, I would then call him next, so that he would be on the phone tree. OMG that’s just terrible! As usual, the special don’t think things will ever apply to them.
I used to just call him up randomly and say something weird like a code phrase, or saying “message received” and hang up, even when I hadn’t spoken to anyone else first. He was freaking out. I have not heard from him about this latest, I was kind of expecting he would pop up saying, How do you like it now, silly lib? I figure he will be against it now. But he is probably just afraid that I will remember my old game and start it up again, linking him to terrorists. They might come to his house and find all his illegal guns and pot farm, and it would be SO UNFAIR.
Villago Delenda Est
@Matt McIrvin:
Many of them vile Rethuglican scum who loved them some Patriot Act as long as the deserting coward was in the White House, but not so much when the near sheriff got actually elected to the office without all sorts of questionable activity in Florida or Ohio.
DFH no.6
@Cacti:
You know, Cacti, we’ve had our little differences when it comes to my age cohort (boomers) being collectively blamed for being worse than Hitler or whatever, but I’m with you 100% on this topic.
Which means to the likes of evil troll Ted & Helen and hair-on-fire joes527 and so on I’m an Obot, or worse.
So there’s some expectation that the national security apparatus of our government (whether the exec is Democratic or Republican) is going to stay away from things like credit card purchases, when that data is shared massively everywhere? Really?
No, you’ve got it right, Cacti – this is just the media (which is mostly GOP-friendly, of course) throwing more “Obama-scandal” shit at the wall, because apparently that’s the season we’re in.
Useful idiots of the left are idiots.
cleek
@Mandalay:
the accountability is happening right now.
Yatsuno
@DFH no.6: It’s the summer. Congress does not do much. The Villagers need something to phone in before cocktail weenie hour at Sally’s next party.
Redshirt
I’ve been involved in “Big Data” for twenty years, and this is all inevitable.
If you’re disturbed by it, you’ll need to adjust your own behaviors rather than hoping the government or big business stops collecting the data. Operate on the following assumption:
There is no true privacy anywhere in the public sphere.
With that in mind, act accordingly.
Mandalay
@joes527: @Narcissus:
You are either being disingenuous, or being willfully blind. The Guardian presented the government with irrefutable evidence of its secret monitoring of phone networks and web sites that it had never acknowledged. The NSA has already been forced to explain its actions.
I think people are right to be freaking out.
Matt McIrvin
@Villago Delenda Est: There was a line back then: “how are you going to feel when Hillary Clinton starts throwing these powers around?” The question stands. Of course the argument wasn’t that persuasive to the Democrats who were voting for it.
The Republicans actually have an opening here to gain some mindshare by showing some principle, harnessing their paranoid streak for a cause that actually makes sense, and not leaving civil libertarianism to fringe figures like Ron Paul. I doubt they will take effective advantage of it, though, because hyper-militarism, “double Gitmo” and posturing about terrorists is such a part of their modern image.
Mandalay
@cleek:
No. The exposure and the backlash is happening right now. If the legal mechanisms that allow the government to monitor us don’t change then there will never be any accountability.
cleek
@Mandalay:
which is why i’ve typed the word “congress” approx 1700 times in the past few days.
catclub
@Matt McIrvin: “harnessing their paranoid streak for a cause that actually makes sense,”
Ha, ha. Like bank reform, only better.
JPL
@Mandalay: In order to monitor an individual, a warrant must be obtained.
rdldot
Is any of this different than what has been reported multiple times over the last ten years? Didn’t we go thru this before, starting with the ATT special rooms that were built in Seattle (or somewhere)? Nobody cared about it then. How is this different. I’m really trying to find out if this is new news, or how it is new news.
Villago Delenda Est
@Mandalay:
The exposure and backlash is all Rethugical theater being used against the Kenyan Muslim Atheist usurper who dares to sully the pristine corridors of the White House with his foul presence.
Do not allow yourself to be fooled for a mother fucking nanosecond about this. Kotex and Huckleberry Closetcase are outraged that the law they helped write and so vehemently supported is being used exactly as they intended it to be used under the nominal direction of that fucking ni*CLANG*.
Mandalay
@rea:
The first issue for me is lack of government accountability.
If the government wants to monitor its citizens then it should draft laws accordingly. The current legislation allows the government to act in secrecy with a lot of leeway and no accountability.
Bruce S
Who ever thought their credit card transactions are private information? I guess I did long, long ago but I haven’t believed that fairy tale for years. We live in the world we live in. The only way to avoid this surveillance is to pay cash for everything, in which case everyone will assume you are a drug dealer.
The government should get warrants to monitor credit card transactions, but the notion of any actual privacy issue here given how the information currently circulates is still rather quaint.
Bruce S
@Redshirt:
This. Sad but true. Also I think a lot of folks are confusing loss of “liberty” or “freedom” with loss of personal privacy. The fact is, most of us have – whether wittingly or not – chosen to give up a large chunk of personal privacy in order to maximize our freedom to do a bunch of shit in ways that are far more convenient. I totally believe that monitoring my credit card purchases is invasive of my privacy, but my credit cards give me some tangible freedom that I wouldn’t experience without them. Trade offs. The things that we’re bitching about are mostly about choices to use relatively public or commercially controlled networks in order to make our lives easier. It’s naive to think that you would have the same control over this space as one does one’s home or personal effects.
cleek
re “sifting”
(yes, i know: “but they can just do what they want and we’ll never know!” you don’t have to bother typing it out )
cleek
@rdldot:
not really. same shit, differently organized.
DFH no.6
@Villago Delenda Est:
The exposure and backlash is all Rethugical theater being used against the Kenyan Muslim Atheist usurper
rdldot
@cleek: Thanks. That’s what I thought. So basically, we are just tagging this on to the other ‘scandals’ of the 2nd-term presidency. I won’t even ask why, at this point.
Mandalay
@rdldot:
This is different because the government has been forced to acknowledge its activities when presented with irrefutable evidence. That has already had at least two important consequences:
[1] The Director of National Intelligence has been forced to release a public statement acknowledging the monitoring.
[2] …the admission places the US in an embarrassing position when it confronts Chinese leaders over their alleged use of cyber-espionage during a long-awaited summit in California on Friday.
joes527
@cleek: Thanks! you saved me some typing.
I wish there was a possible position between “Drown the government in a bathtub” and “Trust government in all things.”
But evidently, either you are with us, or you are with the enemy.
Tonal (visible) Crow
@cleek:
Hahahahahahaha you made a funny. Impeachment is only for Democrats who fib about blow jobs, and “jail time”? What? It’s not even kosher to discuss prosecuting officials who admitted on national TV to ordering torture. What in the world makes you think the same government that’s doing the spying would prosecute itself for the same?
Tonal (visible) Crow
Gotta love the argument here that all this spying is fine because we’ve already “consented” to have Google record our internet usage.
And this from most of the very same people who mock every slippery-slope argument.
Cognitive dissonance much?
MattR
@Mnemosyne:
IMO, my decision to choose to give company A personal information while understanding that they can do X, Y and Z with it is not a blanket agreement for anyone to access that information or for the company to do other things outside the scope of the agreement – whether that is giving the information to the government or giving it to a different third party not covered by the agreement (In fact wasn’t there a brouhaha a few months ago because some cell phone companies were installing a third party app that was accessing more customer data than it was not supposed to?)
Your argument feels very similar to what I hear birthers say about Obama’s BC – Even though state law prohibits the release of the original record (as well as has limitations to who is eligible to receive certifications of the information on a BC), birthers claim that Hawaii was freed from those obligations because Obama released a copy of his BC to the public thus giving up all his privacy rights.
cleek
@Tonal (visible) Crow:
if we’re talking about one party spying on its opposition: history.
see: Nixon, Richard / Watergate.
Mandalay
@Villago Delenda Est:
Well I don’t know who “Kotex” is, but I assume that “Huckleberry Closetcase” is Lindsey Graham, and your claim about him being outraged is absolutely false. Yesterday he said this:
I don’t see a trace of outrage in that statement.
Tonal (visible) Crow
@Bruce S: The question is not what is, but what should be. We should have much stronger privacy protections — from both business and government — that we do. All this “that ship has sailed” argumentation is, at best, an act of despair in place of what ought to be an act of citizenship: petitioning our representatives to dramatically strengthen privacy protections.
Tonal (visible) Crow
@cleek:
Ha. See Feinstein, Dianne.
Tonal (visible) Crow
@Mandalay:
He’s outraged that the spying program has been disclosed, and that it’s not larger and more invasive.
Mandalay
@MattR:
In a similar vein, it’s worth noting that the US government has passed on monitoring data to British security services. It’s not just corporations who are sharing your data.
Cassidy
I’ve honestly assumed that something like this has been going on for decades. The NSA has always done domestic surveillance.
Tonal (visible) Crow
@MattR:
Well said. Also, many (most?) people don’t know what information they’re disclosing to, e.g, Google, nor how the TOS agreements that govern it allow it to be used. I suspect that some of the shock about these spying programs comes from a belated recognition that business and government know far more about many people than they had thought, and are sharing that information far more widely than many people had expected.
—-
Don’t like all the spying? Do something about it.
cleek
@Tonal (visible) Crow:
are you saying Dianne Feinstein would defend a GOP administration using this to spy on Democrats for political purposes ?
cleek
@Cassidy:
ditto
Mandalay
@Tonal (visible) Crow:
You may be right, but he is not saying that publicly AFAIK.
The only Republicans who seem willing to go on the record about their opposition to the monitoring are Mike Lee (who also voted against the Patriot Act) and Rand Paul.
Tonal (visible) Crow
@cleek:
Very likely yes. She’s had little problem with any spying program in recent memory, whether promoted by a Republican or a Democrat. Also too, I don’t recall her doing anything to rein in any of Bush’s “national security” excesses, not even torture. So no, I wouldn’t expect her to depart from her totalitarian script just because someone — totally predictably — used one of these spying programs to damage Democrats politically.
Bruce S
@Tonal (visible) Crow:
To be honest, privacy protection is way down on my list of things that I think we ought to be petitioning our government over.
I’d take serious financial regulation and breaking up the big banks over more privacy protection at this juncture. That created – and potentially can re-create – a real crisis. Also, in the arena of “terrorism” I’m far more concerned about the fallout from reckless interventionism that is still being promoted by the John McCains than I am over the debates around drone strikes or government agencies collecting and searching metadata for possible information indicating terrorist activities. Hell, our decaying infrastructure and the lack of any effective policy dealing with unemployment worries me far more than this.
Our political system isn’t able to handle the most basic issues – this one has so much “bipartisan support” and a sitting administration on it’s behalf that unless I see some truly egregious actual fallout, I’m not going to start waving my hands and shouting about it. (To me “petition” suggests more than just signing a petition, so I really do try to prioritize what issues I can work on.)
Just saying that some issues have a real urgency IMHO and others no so much. There are lots of folks who WISH they could have more credit card transactions to go into the government data base. Not being able to pay down your balances – that’s a real problem. Too many agencies knowing what they add up to? Not so much…
catclub
@Tonal (visible) Crow: Two things. 1. I think DiFi could well be plugged into the amount of money this is sending to Bay Area computer companies and such.
Expanding DHS has put a lot of money into ‘security’ firms.
2. I think that Dick Cheney used the threat of the information he now has available, to manipulate members of congress. Once he does it, everyone know that the next president could also use it.
ETA Tonal Crow at 128: So we agree on this, perhaps in different ways.
fuckwit
Pay no attention to the income inequality behind the curtian!
Behold, the Rethug’s latest strategy to keep progressive voters home: ramp up the Rand Pauls.
Look, Rethugs hate the government– they’d rather have absolute rule by corporations, the military, and the churches (this is the classic Norquist coalition).
So they need to turn people against the government. What better way than by ramping up the Greenwald/Firebagger contingent! This is the latest strategy, I guarantee you. They’ve tested it, focus-grouped it, and it works.
Think about this for a minute. Google, MSFT, FB, and all, already know all this shit about you. That should be creepy and outrageous enough. Instead, we’re getting pissed off about them giving this info to the NSA? Waiiiit a minute here, the NSA is the tail, and the dog is…. whoopsie, sorry pay no attention to the income inequality behind the curtain!
Tonal (visible) Crow
@catclub: Good points, especially about the “security” money streaming into DiFi-related tech firms. I also don’t think it unlikely that Cheney et al have run a Hoover-style enemies operation, nor that they still have moles in the government keeping it current.
ETA: Also too, the ever-increasing multiplicity of criminal laws (and broadening of their applicability, e.g., violations of TOS = felony under CFAA) greatly increase the ability of government to suppress opposition. This area needs total overhaul.
Bruce S
@catclub:
The truth is that if this is a danger to our democracy, it’s far more likely via the implications for professional politicians or anyone who aspires to such. Most of them likely have a lot they could be embarrassed by, even the very trivial (cough…Weiner…cough.) J. Edgar Hoover and his files on pols do come to mind. Although I think the actual scale and technological sophistication of this program makes a Hoover-type being able to control it for personal power nearly impossible in today’s world. In some ways the growth and complexity of government makes it more difficult to control or to keep secrets. We know about this program. And it’s “top secret” – complete with “Top Secret Power Points!” (LOL). The only consolation here is that there are very few actual secrets – for us or the government.
Tonal (visible) Crow
@fuckwit: How about we fight both income inequality and outrageous spying?
Tonal (visible) Crow
@Bruce S:
I don’t see how that follows. I think it much more likely to empower illegitimate coercion than to tamp it down, especially considering the ever-expanding criminal law. Did you know that violating a website’s TOS is a felony under the “Computer Fraud and Abuse Act” in some jurisdictions? (See http://www.insidecounsel.com/2012/05/30/decision-deepens-circuit-split-on-scope-of-cfaa , in which the 9th Circuit did the right thing, in contrast to the 5th, 7th, and 11th Circuits).
Bruce S
[email protected]Cacti:
Actually you’re as nuts as some of the hysterics here if you actually believe The Guardian and/or Greenwald are “GOP-friendly media”. That’s analytic sophistication at the level of Tea Party placards – explains nothing other than the contents of your psyche. And your self-admiration in flaunting such.
Mnemosyne
@roc:
Ask someone whose life has been turned upside-down by identity theft if having their credit ruined and the IRS coming after them for “missed” income tax payments on income they never received whether it was any comfort to them that it was private companies that ruined their life and not the government.
There should be strong restrictions and safeguards on anyone gathering this information, not just the government. But too many people are blase about private companies romping around in their credit ratings while freaking out at the idea that the government knows you pay $25 a month to a porn site.
Mnemosyne
@Ted & Hellen:
Poor Timmy. It always amuses me how you think you should be allowed to abuse other people as much as you want but have your iddle fee-fees hurt if anyone dares treat you the exact same way you treat others. How dare we talk back to you the same way you talk to us? Why don’t we respect your authoritah!?
Bruce S
@Tonal (visible) Crow:
I don’t believe it is possible to maintain the kind of personal control of a government agency that Hoover did in today’s landscape – have no knowledge about case law – just the frequency of leaks, revelations about various programs, proliferation of journalists like Greenwald & Scahill – whom I often disagree w/ on the merits but also consider indispensable to public information an debate. I think it’s possible to not freak out about this, for example, without hating on Greenwald for the disclosure. That’s my nuance. Part of the reason I’m not terrified is because this stuff never stays secret.
Redshirt
Wait till the NSA turns their monitoring program over to Skynet!
Bruce S
@Mnemosyne:
I’ll know this Big Data thing has run amok if BJ starts getting spammed with porn offerings that are below your $25 reference.
Pinkamena Panic
@Bruce S: You mad, Greenrube? Greenwald is a righty, always has been. He cares only about rights as they affect the Rich White Few like himself, like all glibertarians. He’s a selfish little dick.
Cassidy
@Mnemosyne: I think it’s funny how he got quiet for a little while. It’s almost like he was scared for a little bit, but now he seems to be getting his nuts back some.
Bruce S
@Pinkamena Panic:
Don’t out yourself as a total idiot. That’s pathetic if it’s the best you can do in positioning Greenwald.
RaflW
@schrodinger’s cat:
No kidding. One of the things that got me to AA was a bank I had no relationship with mailing me an offer for “the beer lover’s Visa” something like 12 years ago.
ETA: that doesn’t make the banks, Google, or the gov’t right for doing that level of data mining. But then, most sheeple accepted the Patriot Act and all it’s crap so easily, I knew the genie was fully released.
Timmy B
The United States government is intent on destroying your right to privacy. Either you give a shit, or you don’t. Me, I give a shit. I don’t care if Team Blue or Team Red is controlling the government.
From what we know so far, the govenrment collects cell phone data allowing it to track your location, who you call, and how long you speak to them. Thus, the government can tell if you attend pollitical events and who you attend them with.
To those of you who argue that private corporations already collect data, let me say this: While these private corporations collect data, I don’t want my government to collect the data from every one of these corporations and keep it forever. There is a big difference between my local liquor store knowing I buy porn and vodka, and the government knowing. For example, the FBI tried to shut up MLK by threatening to expose his seeing women who he wasn’t married to. On the other hand, the phone company, while it kept records of who he called, didn’t try to blackmail him to get him to stop his political activities.
Bill Arnold
@Todd:
Tonal (visible) Crow
@Timmy B:
That can’t ever happen to B-J denizens (or anyone they care about) because shut up they explain.
True, but if the phone company has the records, it can give them to the government (as with the revelations that birthed this thread). Also, corporations have political interests, and are not beyond coercing people who get in their way. It’s not just Pinkertons with mattocks a hundred years ago, either. Take a gander at what TransCanada is doing to get the right-of-way for Keystone XL, for example. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/18/us/transcanada-in-eminent-domain-fight-over-pipeline.html
Omnes Omnibus
@Mnemosyne: So because people are too blasé about giving info to commercial entities, I should be okay with the government gathering the same data? Search and seizure restrictions on the government are there for a reason, put there by people with experience of what their absence entails. In my view, if the government wants particular information about a particular individual, it should get a warrant for it. Otherwise, it should piss off. I also know that I am probably on the losing side of this one when it eventually hits the SupCt.
eemom
I like the post title.
Omnes Omnibus
@eemom: Meh.
Emma
@Omnes Omnibus: It is supposed to. As the law is written, all the metadata is scooped up but in order to actually access an individual’s content, they have to apply for a warrant. Mileage on trust may vary.
Corner Stone
the horse is out of the barn
the genie is out of the bottle
I’ve been expecting this for 10+ years
Google’s got it, why would I care otherwise after that?
Fucking Greenwald
I’m so sophisticated for being blase on this
As long as it keeps me safe!
I’m sure there are a few oldies but goodies I’m missing.
Corner Stone
Someone please let me know the next time Google has someone executed.
Tonal (visible) Crow
@Corner Stone:
Oh yeah there are:
Any I’ve missed?
Ted & Hellen
@Mnemosyne:
You remain the most willfully obtuse and lying commenter on this board. Which is saying a lot.
Fuck you, bint.
“Bint” being several degrees less horrendous an insult than “pedophile,” am I right?
Corner Stone
@Tonal (visible) Crow:
Dammit, I can’t believe I missed that one. Of course, that’s a more secondary argument on this blog but it’s still such a gold standard keeper I feel like I let you all down for not including it.
The ones going round this blog are more on the level of, “yeah Obama’s doing it. What’d you think was happening?”
Southern Beale
You know, I was shocked about this shit oh, six, seven, eight years ago or so? When I first learned about this? But now it’s like, meh. So it’s kinda amusing to see right-wingers suddenly playing catch-up.
Funny, Bush did all of this shit without a warrant and they were fine with it. But add some judicial oversight and it’s OMG TYRANNY.
And no, I’m not happy about it, I don’t like it no matter who is doing it, but I have a feeling this is the New Normal. In the world we live in today, we’re just gonna have to suck it up. Maybe they can use some of their new-found awesome intelligence to keep shit like this from happening.
Corner Stone
@Corner Stone: Obviously I was getting at the whole, “I don’t like it/not happy about it but whuttayagonnado?” mentality, so I think that’s been covered.
Mnemosyne
@Omnes Omnibus:
When you put it that way … yes. IMO, publicly available data is publicly available and (IMO) the government shouldn’t be automatically restricted from reading things that you voluntarily published in a public place. Should the government be restricted from acting on leaks they found out about by reading the New York Times because they didn’t get a warrant to read the paper?
Things like e-mails, bank information, etc. are more restricted and should remain so, but I don’t understand people who think they have an expectation of privacy when posting on a public website like Facebook.
I’m pretty sure the Founding Fathers had no idea that someday entire libraries of information would be able to be transmitted in the blink of an eye. I’m also pretty sure that they had no idea that “search and seizure” would apply to bits of data that identify technology they couldn’t imagine.
I think that privacy and search and seizure laws should be updated to fit with current technology. As I’ve said multiple times, I think Europe has a much better model for regulating this stuff than we do. I disagree that police should only be allowed to use the same tools available in 1781 to investigate crimes, so getting a search warrant for e-mail should be verboten and ISPs should refuse to allow the government access to user accounts even if the government has a valid warrant.
Mandalay
@Tonal (visible) Crow:
Pretty comprehensive, but here are a few more…
– “Google…the government. What’s the difference?”
– A condescending “Meh”.
– “Why should anyone have any expectation of privacy on the Internet???!!!”
– “It’s not as though they can access your conversations!”.
TenguPhule
@Timmy B:
The Right to Privacy Died when the GOP “Patriot-is the new bludgeon” Act passed.
It died with a whimper.
Held the funeral over a decade ago, we’ve done our mourning and now are amused that the GOP just discovered that they are now under the guns, so to speak.
Mandalay
@TenguPhule:
You could not be more wrong. With the notable exceptions of Rand Paul and Mike Lee, the GOP is not at all concerned about the recent revelations. In fact this is a rare example of Republicans supporting and embracing Administration policy.
Mnemosyne
@Omnes Omnibus:
Also, too, here’s where I’m going with that:
If there is certain information that we want to be inaccessible to the government, what we need to do is make it illegal for private companies to gather that information, too. Otherwise, the temptation will always exist for the government to re-legislate to make those private companies give that information to them. Better to say, “No one can have that information about you,” than “Well, some people can have it, but they have to be nice and not give it to others.”
Ted & Hellen
@Mnemosyne:
Idiot.
Omnes Omnibus
@Mnemosyne: Good fucking god. No one is talking about the government being able to read twitters, blog comments, or the like. Information posted in a public forum is public. The concern is emails, content placed in Dropbox, and things like that.
Next, I didn’t say that getting a search warrant for email shouldn’t be allowed; I haven’t the faintest idea how you could have gotten that idea by actually reading what I have posted. Jesus, I am not an insane originalist. The point is that communications methods like email that are supplanting postal mail have the same types of privacy protection that postal mail would get. People used to mail checks to pay bills. Now they pay online with a credit card. Should they have less privacy now? I say no. You say?
Corner Stone
@Omnes Omnibus:
Welcome! Welcome to the amazing world that is Capt Mnemo.
It really doesn’t matter what you say. She hears things in her little brain chamber and then reassembles them in ways no one but her can actually recognize.
In other words, she’s a sociopath and a congenital liar.
Ted & Hellen
@Corner Stone:
You said “con-genital.”