I'm sure I'm going to take a karma hit, but please tell me if I'm getting any of this wrong, since it doesn't seem to mesh with a lot of the Snowden reporting: Snowden grabs a significant amount of the NSA's actual reporting and collection, hands it to the Washington Post and they find that:<p>- The NSA is actively scrubbing the collection and removing the identities of Americans<p>- The most egregious privacy violation that WaPo could find was a set of love letters between an Australian government employee and her boyfriend who went off to Afghanistan to join the Taliban<p>- In the process of doing this, the NSA is pulling out information on "a secret overseas nuclear project, double-dealing by an ostensible ally, a military calamity that befell an unfriendly power, and the identities of aggressive intruders into U.S. computer networks"<p>- The WaPo estimates that around 900k people's communications are caught up in the NSA's "incidental" collection<p>I could see an argument made for future abuse, but this really seems to fly in the face of grand conspiracy theories that we've been seeing for the last year.
A funny line:<p>> Some of them border on the absurd, using titles that could apply to only one man. A “minimized U.S. president-elect” begins to appear in the files in early 2009, and references to the current “minimized U.S. president” appear 1,227 times in the following four years.<p>Barton Gellman clarified:<p>> Lotta questions on this. The 1200 references to “minimized US president” come when people talk about him in intercepted conversations.<p><a href="https://twitter.com/bartongellman/status/485604791867817986" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/bartongellman/status/485604791867817986</a><p>So this doesn't confirm that the NSA was reading Obama's mail, like Russ Tice has claimed. But it does belie NSA's claims that Snowden had no access to FISA material, and cast doubt on all their "stringent" security procedures to prevent misuse of intelligence material. If Snowden could sneak out with it, what else could be done without their knowledge?
Is it my bad understanding of the language or does the word "target" in headline mislead? I read it as "don't worry, the NSA does only target a minority" while the text starts with "Ordinary Internet users (...) far outnumber legally targeted foreigners in the communications intercepted (...)"<p>I would have added "legally", so it would read "In NSA-intercepted data, those not legally targeted far outnumber the foreigners who are"
This is a stunning report...not least of which in how it continues to show the NSA's apparently shoddy IT...the PowerPoint presentations being taken are one thing, but the hundreds of thousands of pieces of surveillance data, and that's just what the Post chose to sift through.<p>Still, the specifics of data extraction aren't clear...are the NSA mining a data stream as they please from Facebook? Or are the Facebook transcripts, as detailed in the closing anecdote, a result of a data request in an ongoing investigation of a previously identified suspect?...which is, purportedly, the same kind of access any law enforcement agency can make.
So out of billions they only "target" (whatever that means) hundreds of million of people? That doesn't make me feel a lot safer. The 9:1 thing is completely out of context and meaningless. Plus, we don't know exactly what a target is and what's a non-target (on which they could still gather data...just not, you know..."target it").
I have some methodological problems with this piece. They're making claims about the makeup of this data set, that 50% of the documents contain minimized references to US persons for instance, or that 90% of the account holders were not intelligence targets, but we don't actually know whether this data represents NSA collections as a whole. There are 160,000 documents over a four-year period. That seems far too low to be the sum total of all NSA collections, so it must be a sample. But is it a random sample or was this data selected by Snowden using some criteria? How do we know that Snowden didn't choose data from one particular program or using certain selectors and that that particular data tends to have more or less US persons or a higher or lower percentage of intelligence targets than NSA intercepts taken as a whole?<p>I also find the following claim problematic:
>> Many of them were Americans. Nearly half of the surveillance files, a strikingly high proportion, contained names, e-mail addresses or other details that the NSA marked as belonging to U.S. citizens or residents. NSA analysts masked, or “minimized,” more than 65,000 such references to protect Americans’ privacy...<p>So there were 65,000 minimized references in 160,000 documents. But we also know that a "minimized reference" doesn't actually mean the a US person was the sender or the recipient - for instance, we know from Gellman that someone talking about President Obama would constitute a minimized reference. The first sentence, "Many of them were American" is not quantified, likely because the Post doesn't actually know how many participants in the intercepts were American.
The infographic shows 556 intercepted videos out of 100,000 intercepted communications, the majority of which are text messages and email.<p>So why aren't the terrorist evildoers hiding their few KB of text communications within multi-GB YouTube videos of cats and video games?