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Keith Olbermann interviews Russell Tice - NSA Wistleblower - on Countdown Part One

Breaking: former-NSA whistleblower on KO says domestic spying much worse (How the NSA do it?)

Mr. Tice talked at some length about the difference between large-scale technical surveillance and more focused directed surveillance. If I've understood him correctly, then I think I can explain what he was talking about by using email as an example.

If you were interested in screening huge amounts of email, but didn't have the capacity to capture or store it all, you might decide to just content yourself with the metadata. Metadata is just "data about data". For instance, in the case of email, some interesting metadata might be: (a) what language it's in (b) the sender's address (c) the recipient's address (d) the length in bytes (e) the length in lines (f) what kinds of attachments, if any (g) what mail program was used to compose it (h) what the Subject line was, and so on.

This sort of metadata is relatively easy to extract and takes up a lot less room than the actual data: the metadata for an email message with 2M of photos attached might fit in 1K. (And this is the point where it should dawn on you that similar metadata exists for faxes, phone calls, and every other electronic form of communication.)MORE

Russel Tice on Countdown with Olbermann - part 2

NSA whistleblower Russell Tice on Countdown w/KO, Day Two (update X4)

Yesterday, Russell Tice appeared on Countdown with Keith Olberman (video) (transcript) to talk about large-scale surveillance and data acquisition conducted during the Bush Administration. I wrote about it here, gimmeshelter wrote about it here, and mcjoan wrote about it here.
Tonight, Mr. Tice was back and was joined by James Risen of the NYT.

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The two tiers of surveillance that Mr. Tice described consist of all-encompassing metadata acquisition and more tightly focused data acquisition. Here's an example of how that might work (using email to illustrate, as I did yesterday): suppose you know that The Bad Guys all picked up a certain brand of cheap digital camera and that's what they're using to take pictures of potential targets and share them. Suppose that this particular model of camera has a default setting of 1846x948 pixels, and suppose that The Bad Guys are transferring these files around via email, using accounts on free mail providers like Yahoo and Hotmail and Gmail.

What might happen is that somebody writes an algorithm that looks at all the email and flags anything that is to a free mail provider, from a free mail provider, has attached photos, and has attached photos that are 1846x948. That's the first tier, based entirely on metadata.

Whenever a message is found that matches those criteria, the sender and recipient(s) are noted and from then on, everything they send or receive gets vacuumed up. And that extends way beyond email: if the sender's phone number or fax number or IM account or anything else can be identified, then everything associated with those gets included too. And per Mr. Tice's comments about pulling in data from external databases: their credit card records, their bank records, everything else.
That's the second tier, where every scrap of data is picked up.

Which means that if you happened to buy the same cheap digital camera as The Bad Guys and you happen to use Gmail, you're going to be swept up by that same algorithm and all of your data will be given the same special attention as theirs.MORE

James Risen on Countdown with Keith Olbermann

In addition to his two interviews with NSA whistle blower Russell Rice, Olbermann also had on NY Times journalist James Risen who first broke the story about this program in 2005.

Of Privacy, Terrorist Surveillance and Data Mining (v2.0)

?While the NSA and DHS do have not to date publicly discussed the specifics of their surveillance programs, we now have a whistle blower confirming that they do indeed exist, and that they are using machine learning and data mining techniques.

The sort of automated machine learning techniques that appear to be utilized by the NSA are are fairly common these days; on-line retailers use them to detect fraud, credit card companies use them to detect stolen cards, lenders (whether they actually use the results or not) use them to determine loan risks, and advertisers use them extensively to target ads.MORE

Questions to Ponder: The Societal Ramifications of Government Data Mining

What happens, as a society, to us when our expectation of privacy is degraded, knowing that there is at least a chance that any electronic communication will be viewed by a stranger, let alone the government? How does the change in expectation of privacy change how we view ourselves? Our other views on our expectations of privacy? Our other freedoms? Other people's freedoms?

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With the technical and non-technical (e.g., political, organizational, people level security, etc.) considerations taken into account, how does one prevent blackmail situations? How does one prevent those who run the system from using the data for personal gain?

Who would have access to the data collected, or portions of the data? Does one have the right to view one's own data set? If so, can one ask that mistakes be corrected? Who is responsible for the correctness of the data? Would corporations be able to, in any manner gain access to the data? Could one be able to look at a family member's data? A friend's? A stranger's? Could the data be sold? Could the data be subpoenaed in non-terrorist criminal and civil proceedings? Could it be used for as the basis for credit ratings? Could it be used by the IRS? By debt collectors? Could the military use it in the context of "don't ask, don't tell"?

How does one secure the system from hackers? And not just the actual data repositories, but also, the collection taps and the communication between those taps and the repositories. Compromising such a system would become the Holy Grail of identity thieves. Such a system would also become the primary target in e-warfare; a centralized repository with that level of information about every single US citizen would be irresistible. Computer security is a never ending competition in which the good guys can never loose a single round, but the bad guys only need to win once to achieve victory. Are we willing to take the risk of massive data theft inherent in having such a system?MORE

Will someone please explain to me why this story isn't headline news around the traditional media?