NSA chief: ‘We’re the only ones not spying on the American people’

There's a discussion to be had here. If you're a foreign intelligence agency looking to commit espionage, how hard would it be to get someone inside a Verizon or AT&#38;T? Imagine what type of pervasive data a potential adversary could gather via these means?<p>Something any major business with foreign competitors should consider before using cloud services or trusting telecom vendors.

One way of interpreting his comments: We suck up all the data and then apply filters to remove domestic information. Although the NSA has access to information on the American people, it does not specifically target Americans and discards purely domestic information. As such, it is not "spying on the American people" so much as inflicting collateral damage on the privacy of the American people.<p>To a certain extent, this is understandable. The NSA may not trust Verizon's judgment on who a foreign national is. And the nature of a more specific request may reveal classified information -- e.g. if the NSA asked for "all calls to Libya" just prior to the bombing campaign, that may have revealed something was up.<p>That's not to say any of this is justified, or that the attempts to filter out domestic information are effective. Apparently, you have to be 49% foreign or less to be filtered out, whatever that means (<a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/06/bombshell-report-nsa-and-fbi-tapping-directly-into-tech-companies-servers/276633/" rel="nofollow">http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/06/bombsh...</a>).<p>But it's the explanation I would give if I were him.

There's two things here: a lie by omission if they are <i>receiving the data</i> via other agencies; and he's also saying that every other agency is spying on the American people. Someone might want to look into that last part, because I'm fine for taking the flashlight off of the NSA if every other agency is participating in this activity.<p>Sen. Feinstein, are you there?

The "everybody does it" defense? OMG.

Keith Alexander, NSA Chief, once blamed his late arrival at a Washington event to a DDoS (distributed denial of service) hacking attack on city street lights.... Wow.

Hmmm. What's a juicier target than Apple, Google, Micrsoft? And <i>they've</i> all been compromised by Chinese hackers before.<p>I wonder how well they background check all the people working on their new data facility in Utah.

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