Where are they gonna back all of it up?

NSA collects millions of e-mail address books globally

Washington Post

Analysis of that data enables the agency to search for hidden connections and to map relationships within a much smaller universe of foreign intelligence targets.

During a single day last year, the NSA’s Special Source Operations branch collected 444,743 e-mail address books from Yahoo, 105,068 from Hotmail, 82,857 from Facebook, 33,697 from Gmail and 22,881 from unspecified other providers, according to an internal NSA PowerPoint presentation. Those figures, described as a typical daily intake in the document, correspond to a rate of more than 250 million a year.

Is a key feature of the illness known as paranoia an obsession with finding connections that are not there?


The NSA’s director, Gen. Keith B. Alexander, has defended “bulk” collection as an essential counterterrorism and foreign intelligence tool, saying, “You need the haystack to find the needle.”

Even with that metaphor standing on its head, isn't it still folly?

The picture can also be misleading, creating false “associations” with ex-spouses or people with whom an account holder has had no contact in many years. 


The same way a suspicious spouse might make everything into evidence of an affair?


The agency avoids the restrictions in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act by intercepting contact lists from access points “all over the world,” one official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the classified program. “None of those are on U.S. territory.”

So the NSA has to have the despotic power they are supposedly saving us from?


When information passes through “the overseas collection apparatus,” the official added, “the assumption is you’re not a U.S. person.”

Now the presumption of guilt stands on its head......


A senior U.S. intelligence official said the privacy of Americans is protected, despite mass collection, because “we have checks and balances built into our tools.”

NSA analysts, he said, may not search within the contacts database or distribute information from it unless they can “make the case that something in there is a valid foreign intelligence target in and of itself.”

And since it is a secret if that is happening, or even how that works, we just have to take his word on it.....


Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in August that the committee has less information about, and conducts less oversight of, intelligence gathering that relies solely on presidential authority. She said she planned to ask for more briefings on those programs.

Don't feel bad that you don't know what is going on, no one in DC really does either.....


The volume of NSA contacts collection is so high that it has occasionally threatened to overwhelm storage repositories, forcing the agency to halt its intake with “emergency detasking” orders.

Now it begins to sound like the show Hoarders.....


Spam has proven to be a significant problem for the NSA — clogging databases with information that holds no foreign intelligence value. The majority of all e-mails, one NSA document says, “are SPAM from ‘fake’ addresses and never ‘delivered’ to targets.”

All that money and they don't have spam filters? Or just too pathological to miss out on anything?


(Full Story)