reminder: Big Brother is watching

With the public’s focus elsewhere, it is easy for important news to slide by. This bit reported in the Washington Times is one such item. Click on the link for their full 3-page article, complete with lame justifications from official obfuscators.

I encourage you who use modern electronic means of communication to read at least the parts I post below and be fully aware that Big Brother is indeed collecting a whole lot of everything you do, who you communicate with and linking all that together in a comprehensive electronic picture of EVERYONE everywhere.

This is NOT for your benefit:

NSA collects millions of address books

Their (above) link has a video: In June, President Obama said the NSA’s email collecting program “does not apply to U.S. citizens.” Their article carries the truth which is in direct opposition to his words … so what’s new?

The National Security Agency is harvesting hundreds of millions of contact lists from personal e-mail and instant messaging accounts around the world, many of them belonging to Americans, according to senior intelligence officials and top-secret documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

The collection program, which has not been disclosed before, intercepts e-mail address books and “buddy lists” from instant messaging services as they move across global data links. Online services often transmit those contacts when a user logs on, composes a message, or synchronizes a computer or mobile device with information stored on remote servers.

Rather than targeting individual users, the NSA is gathering contact lists in large numbers that amount to a sizable fraction of the world’s e-mail and instant messaging accounts. 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.

Each day, the presentation said, the NSA collects contacts from an estimated 500,000 buddy lists on live-chat services as well as from the inbox displays of Web-based e-mail accounts.

The collection depends on secret arrangements with foreign telecommunications companies or allied intelligence services in control of facilities that direct traffic along the Internet’s main data routes.

Although the collection takes place overseas, two senior U.S. intelligence officials acknowledged that it sweeps in the contacts of many Americans. They declined to offer an estimate but did not dispute that the number is likely to be in the millions or tens of millions.

Now here is a pile of poo:

A spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees the NSA, said the agency “is focused on discovering and developing intelligence about valid foreign intelligence targets like terrorists, human traffickers and drug smugglers. We are not interested in personal information about ordinary Americans.”

Contact lists stored online provide the NSA with far richer sources of data than call records alone. Address books commonly include not only names and e-mail addresses, but also telephone numbers, street addresses, and business and family information. Inbox listings of e-mail accounts stored in the “cloud” sometimes contain content, such as the first few lines of a message.

This is where Page 1 of 3 ends. You can go to the link at the top of this page to see their whole 1st page as well as the other two and the video. Below is the first online reader’s response, which I thought summed it up pretty well.

Matt Bracken
10/14/2013 5:33 PM MDT
Comrades, do not naysay the critical work of the State Security Services! NSA is vital cog in IRS-NSA-ACA data hubs. The SSS must be able to track down reactionary running dog capitalists who oppose our Dear Leader Comrade Obama, as he struggles day and night to deliver first-quality National Socialist heath rationing system to all good comrades, (like in glorious worker’s paradise Cuba), while smashing right-wing extremists who hold to outdated notions of so-called “freedom” and “privacy” and “Bill of Rights” under former capitalist “Constitution.” Onward to victory, comrades! Do not deny SSS needed tools to deliver glorious new dawn of socialist equality to all good comrades!