US judge rules NSA phone surveillance program is LEGAL

reply to post by xuenchen


There is likely no evidence because the evidence is getting covered up, as the other Reuters article that I linked to shows in its title -. I'm involved in a case right now where the police are covering up evidence of corruption - and it isn't easy to get that evidence, even with a good lawyer -

Imagine how many people using public defenders are facing police that are not following the rules and don't have the money to investigate. And how, exactly, is a defendant supposed to investigate their police department without getting into more trouble, at any rate?

This would be up to the freaking news media to do... and whistle-blowers like Snowden - but we have Michael Hastings getting assassinated, and Assange and Snowden being hunted down by the U.S. Government.

Evidence? Sure, there's evidence out there. But how to get it?

In my opinion, this court case should be struck down as soon as the reasoning for it (that there is no evidence of the surveillance being used for anything other than terrorist activities) becomes false.

Miniscuzz
Has anyone considered that this whole PRISM dragnet is just PROPOGANDA aimed at making the masses think that the government sees all and knows all?? I mean, I'm no expert in meta-data or Cray computing, but I am an expert on common sense. Let's run some numbers and see if any of this poppycock passes the sniff test:

Spoken like someone who doesn't understand how it works. They collect and STORE all this information, they don't even scan everything, it just goes into a giant database that they can query once they know what they're looking for. Instead they focus on the connections (metadata), primarily who is talking to who. Once you have this data you can reconstruct social networks of people, from there you can figure out what groups they're in. Once you know the groups you can look at how they relate to each other and flag certain ones (say the ones that are connected to a person of interest by between 0 and 2 degrees of separation... I don't know how many they actually use). This can all be done automatically, it's relatively simple actually, all it is is sorting data alphabetically or numerically by phone number for example and creating a giant matrix. You can do the same thing with email. This will explain it.

Once you have this, you'll have narrowed down the phone numbers considerably. If you have an initial list of 150 terrorists, and each person has a network of 30 people, there will be 1,350,000 points of interest at 2 degrees of separation. At 2 billion phone calls per day that's 6.67 phone calls per person. With 1,350,000 people of interest that's 9,004,500 potential phone calls of interest or 0.45% of all phone calls made. This simple automation has removed 99.55% of all data. Next, because we don't have terrorist leaders functioning on US soil, out of those remaining 9 million phone calls any connections that are domestic to domestic are excluded. Again this is easy to automate, you simply ignore any calls where each parties number begins with a country code of 1. I don't know what this number is but I have to assume atleast 80% of calls are made domestically. So those calls of interest are reduced to 1,800,900 calls. Less than 1/10 of 1% of the initial volume. That's still too many to manually inspect though as it would require 100% of the NSA's manpower to each listen to 60 calls per day.

I don't know the methods they use to narrow things down past this point but I imagine they start cross referencing with groups. Terrorist activity tends to fall within calls that last a certain duration and are made at a certain frequency. This information would be gathered over time and is Top Secret I would imagine. Regardless, the analysts don't have to know because the computer can check for them. By comparing several days or weeks worth of communications these patterns appear (just the same as you get the social networks over several days/weeks of data). You can then flag people that check in at a certain frequency and have calls fall within a certain time frame. Again, this will eliminate about 95% of communications bringing the total number of phone calls of interest to 90,045.

At this point the data has been reduced to a workable amount. Hypothetically lets say they're looking at calls that happen every 30-45 days and last 15-20 minutes. This is specifically calls from cells in the US to overseas organizers, and some (about 99.9% of the calls) innocent people that fit the profile. Using supercomputers you can then search these audio files using voice recognition software creating indexes of words spoken and ignore super common words like a, the, at, like, um, and so on.

I don't know what trick they have past this point, but the one I linked above can be used again though it's perhaps not the most efficient way to go about things.

You create a giant index of data listing the word, conversation, and timestamp it appears. Then you create a giant matrix of data, in your columns are the groups (each party of a 2 party conversation) and your rows are a list of all the words spoken. Each time a word is spoken in a group you mark it. What this will do is create an association of keywords per group. The advantage here is that one cell may refer to their bomb as a package while another refers to it as an event yet you can flag them both without having to make either common word a keyword in all conversations. Anyways, the main idea here is that you look for words which have little relation to other words commonly spoken in the conversations. This can mostly be accomplished through dictionary and thesaurus lookups to identify nouns/verbs and similar words. The words that have no or few associated meanings become flagged. It's worth repeating that out of the initial coding of this system (which isn't THAT difficult, I could write the pseudocode for the entire thing in just a few minutes) everything up to this point is automated.

Here you'll be able to exclude about 99% of conversations again as you're only looking for rare words that aren't associated with a groups typical conversational subjects. You're now down to 900 conversations of interest. With a staff of 30,000 you would only need 3% of your workforce to each listen to 1 conversation a day to hear everything interesting. A task that's well within the realm of possibility.

I assume they have techniques more advanced than what I listed here, this is just what I've been able to figure out on my own and with a little reading, and it makes sense with the idea that they can't actually reveal what they do. If we were to know they wouldn't flag the word runner in a conversation about a marathon, suddenly everyone has a non suspicious word for bomb in that type of event. The same thing can be applied to email and text messages, except you can skip the voice recognition portion.

reply to post by Aazadan


Hmm... well PRISM exists, I have a friend who has done wiring at a PRISM facility in New York. I believe that the PRiSM facility uses real-time monitoring of network traffic (end belief) by illegally wiring in to major network nodes in big cities and siphoning that traffic into their computer centers, kind of like splitting your neighbor's cable television cord and getting a signal off of it.

Back to what I was thinking... the poster above me has interesting data on the mechanics of how the operation works. I'm not certain that they shift everything to physical storage, though - a lot of the data may just be looked at in real-time and let go.

Meta-data - that's an interesting concept, see. It's actually worse for our freedoms that they are using meta-data. That means that their algorithms are able to pick up on questionable conversations using keywords and / or behavioral patterns.

So what happens after the meta-data picks someone of interest, eh? Does everyone really think that the N.S.A. will stick to only using meta-data? How would that prevent "terrorism?"

After someone is identified using the questionable meta-data practices, then I'm sure that the N.S.A. will then move on to much more specific, non-meta, ways of wiretapping.

darkbake
reply to post by Aazadan

 

Hmm... well PRISM exists, I have a friend who has done wiring at a PRISM facility in New York. I believe that the PRiSM facility uses real-time monitoring of network traffic (end belief) by illegally wiring in to major network nodes in big cities and siphoning that traffic into their computer centers, kind of like splitting your neighbor's cable television cord and getting a signal off of it.

What they're doing is different for voice vs written communications. Voice conversations are stored very inefficiently with regards to space. A typed document holds ~2736 characters on a page (varies by character and font size) which translates into 391 words. The average speaking rate for english is 130 words per minute meaning it takes just about 3 minutes to read a page. At a bitrate of 256k that converts to 5.76 MB of data. As a typed document however it's only 2.7 KB. The typed document is .00046% of the size for the same data. Because of these massive differences in file size the bandwidth to send all the voice conversations to the NSA is difficult at best. So what the NSA does is make the telcoms store it all for an unknown period of time while the metadata is sent to the NSA. From the metadata they use the techniques I listed before (as well as a bunch I don't know about I'm sure) to narrow things down into the .001% of data that's most interesting. At that point they send a request for those call logs from the telcoms which get sent to the NSA servers and stored in the database where they filter the data again, with the end result eventually being an analyst that listens to the call.

Written communications take up far less file space for the same information, I imagine they're storing all of that (specifically, everything that goes over US fiber on the internet, there's only 3 locations they have to gather data on, and then send it to the central hub). This can be done in real time for the most part and is likely what you're thinking of.

The Utah datacenter has an absolutely ridiculous storage capacity already (approximately 1/3 of all data storage on the planet I believe) and I can guarantee you they plan to use it all. NSA officials have even said they predict the need for yottabytes of storage within the next few years. To put this in perspective, all of the storage capacity on earth doesn't even total 1 yottabyte currently and they want even more than that just for their own data 5 years from now. If they want that much storage I can only begin to imagine how much they're collecting and saving.

Meta-data - that's an interesting concept, see. It's actually worse for our freedoms that they are using meta-data. That means that their algorithms are able to pick up on questionable conversations using keywords and / or behavioral patterns.

Metadata is much easier to work with, it's also not as well understood by people. Metadata is a very good way to filter information without having to actually go through the data itself. Technically it doesn't violate our privacy because it's information the phone company was already recording for billing purposes, even though metadata is only supposed to be accessed with a warrant.

So what happens after the meta-data picks someone of interest, eh? Does everyone really think that the N.S.A. will stick to only using meta-data? How would that prevent "terrorism?"

Once they have someone of interest (even though 99% of those are innocent people) they have probable cause to get a warrant and go through the conversations the NSA conveniently made the companies store ahead of time.

reply to post by JBA2848


I'm not sure what your point is? According to your link, it's simply the duty of the position John Roberts holds right now. He can appoint them or I suppose he can tender his own resignation for whatever good that would do, so the next one up can do it instead.

If you suggest it automatically disqualifies him or compromises the court's ability to judge a case, I'll simply disagree.

I'd also note John Roberts and Barack Obama DO NOT like each other and Obama's luck for much of anything before this Court following his ridicule of them before a world audience has been atrocious. Even the ACA was decided to appear a victory for those looking to find one ....while insuring the actual law as they left it would be self defeating to it's own demise. The ability for states to flat refuse to expand Medicare and Medicaid, with NO ability for the Feds to penalize through normal channels has all but doomed it to die .....and many of us were saying this at the time of the decision. Others were celebrating the half that did seem a win, to notice the bomb put in the middle of it.

I'm quite comfortable with Roberts catching this in his Court. What I DO worry about is a change of balance to the Court between now and then.

The government is paranoid of the citizens because it knows how unlawful and corrupt it is. It knows if the people found out en masse there would be hangings in the street. It typical behavior for a psychopath to seek to entrap their victim in some petty flaw so they may justify their outrageous abuse.

reply to post by iRoyalty


Something I pointed out on another thread that seems to have gone unnoticed...

If the President and Politicians are in place to screw us out of our liberties by creating frivolous and over-reaching laws, would it not make sense that the President would appoint Judges just as corrupted to uphold those laws?

Judge William Pauley III was appointed to the bench by President, "I didn't do it!" Bill Clinton... You guys remember that guy who claimed he never sexually assaulted his intern/secretary? Yeah him...

Pauley's ruling contrasted with a ruling of a similar suit in the D.C. District by Richard J. Leon.

JBA2848
reply to post by Miniscuzz

 

www.washingtonpost.com...

Tor is funded by USAID and the USDOD. When you send that information out to bounce around. It bounced around government computers. They know who sent what where. They just hide that information from other countries in order to protect all those groups they say fight for freedom in other countries.

You obviously have zero clue what you're talking about. Tor is open source and there are no back doors. Once I load Tor through the Tails/Linux OS, there isn't an agency in the world that can figure out the original IP.
Tor doesn't link to any Dept. of any US acronym agencies servers...meaning that there's no way the NSA or any other agency could ever find any Tor user who isn't using a Windows based OS or using such anti-virus such as Norton. Not only does Tor/Tails using Linux have a 4086 bit encryption, it changes the users IP every time they switch pages either on clearnet or deepweb. No computer has the ability to decrypt a 4086 bit encryption and to claim otherwise is asinine.

The overall point is that the government agencies are just trying to scare you sheep into believing that they can find you wherever you are and that just isn't true if you're using the proper precautions. Learn a bit more about Linux OS and computer security in general before you try to compare brainpans with me on that particular subject...my Masters in Computer Security from RIT carries more weight than any link you could possibly provide.

Stop being scared and quit using Windows...switch to Tails/Linux OS and you could threaten POTUS himself without anyone ever finding you.....ever.

reply to post by Aazadan


I think it's YOU that doesn't understand the argument I'm making.

You wrote about how they just store this data and then they can search it when/if they find some terrorist right?

Well, if my name is Billy Terrorist, do you really think that I'm going to go get a phone from Verizon using the name Billy Terrorist, or will Billy just buy a prepaid number using no ID? Will Billy Terrorist then add 30 of his closest Terrorist buddies into his contact list?? Doubtful to say the least.

Do you really think Billy Terrorist has a Facebook page with him and all his Terrorist buddies posing with AK's on it just PMing eachother about the newest suicide vests?

Think Billy is using his real name for his email account...emailing all his phone contacts about the next bombing?

The gibberish that the NSA is somehow able to connect terrorist "cells" using Metadata or any other data is so stupid I shouldn't even have to explain it.


You get where I'm going with that right?

REAL terrorists aren't using their own names. REAL terrorists are switching phone numbers, emails, logins etc on a daily basis. Do you know what that means? That means that the NSA and all other acronym agencies have NO CHOICE BUT to go over ALL the information they CLAIM they're keeping. So your arguments about narrowing things down and blah blah blah makes absolutely NO sense to anyone with common sense.

One day its Billy the Terrorist with a burner phone/email addy. The next morning, Billy changes everything to Betty...it's that simple.

Metadata is just data about data....meaning that if I have a video file, the metadata of that video will be certain details of the overall file ie: date created, some text about the content, author, and perhaps location. ALL of which is subject to the author providing TRUE and ACCURATE file info....which Billy surely isn't.

So...if Billy creates a new "Terrorist" video on Monday, and then another on Teusday as Betty, there's absolutely NO WAY the NSA or Jesus Christ himself could tell that the two were connected UNLESS they are viewed by an actual human being. There's also no way to connect the two authors using the information in your post.

Therein lies the conundrum and the proof that it's a scam. There's NO useful info to be gained by Metadata and that term is only being used as a "buzz word" which just further confuses the stupid masses because they have no clue what the term even means.


To further illustrate my point, please tell me how you would find any data or information about Billy the Terrorist or any of his contacts or personal information if Billy were to plan a terrorist act this way:

Billy buys a burner phone and calls Osama on his new burner phone. They discuss a bombing in Philly for an hour then both toss the phones. Billy then jumps on his Safe-Mail account through Tor and sends a mass email to 5 other terrorists involved in the bombing giving them instructions to get burner phones and he will call them the next day at 5pm UTC.

Billy buys another burner phone and has a conference call with the other 5 terrorists and chats for an hour going over all the details. He instructs them that he will upload a video to YT with further instructions and will text them the link the next day.

Billy creates a YT account through Tor using Linux and uploads a 5 minute instructional video calling it "My thoughts on Jesus" (which most lay people would never search), then uses another burner phone to text the other 5 terrorists the link on their new burner phones.

Now, Billy has used email, YT, texts, and voice calls. All of which the NSA collected "metadata" on. I assert that without a crystal ball, NO LINK will ever, or CAN EVER be made using the data supposedly collected without MANUALLY going through every single communication worldwide by a HUMAN BEING.

If you claim otherwise, then you are a lost cause. With just a little computer knowledge, you'd understand that PRISM as claimed, is complete nonsense and is just propaganda. That is the only reasonable answer sir.

Mamatus


Personally my only real fear of the NSA is that someday they allow regular law enforcement access to their records for everyday prosecutions. It is hard to maintain credibility on the stand when the NSA has better records of where you were and when, then you do..... This is the real fear.

That's exactly what they do with the information. The NSA shares it with state and local authorities.

nixie_nox
reply to post by iRoyalty

 

Where in the Constitution does it say you have a right to privacy?

Just saying..
old.post-gazette.com...

Amendment IX: The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

Also in case you dont click the link.. This is added..

The Constitution mentions nothing called the "right of privacy." In 1973 the Supreme Court, relying in large part on preceding rulings that overturned state laws forbidding contraception, found that an inherent right to personal privacy existed.

reply to post by darkbake


Well, if the Tsarnaev brothers are an example of persons of interest (let's also remember that Russia identified them as such as well), then they'll look at them, send agents out to them, decide that they aren't a threat, and then walk away so that the Tsarnaevs could drop some pressure cooker bombs loaded with nails at a marathon. Based on the information that has been released about the Tsarnaevs and on PRISM, they should've been under surveillance for their ties and more. And yet, it didn't work. People still died and were severely wounded because the intelligence agencies, despite all the latitude and tools given, failed. Ergo, PRISM is a failure. If I had one question to ask Snowden, I would ask him what was that final straw that pushed him to release all that he has because I'd really like to know if that final straw was Boston.

When a program seems to be working and has no evidence to the contrary, it's much easier to accept it as a necessary evil. When that program fails to perform its intended purpose, it's much, much harder to support.

Miniscuzz
Has anyone considered that this whole PRISM dragnet is just PROPOGANDA aimed at making the masses think that the government sees all and knows all??

***snip***

This is all propaganda in which the government is trying to scare it's citizens into thinking that it's impossible to dissent because they know everything about what you and your neighbors are doing at all times?

The answer is obvious to me.

It seems to me that once the secret services get a notion of something devious, they will have the possibility to sift through data to find valuable links between evil doers, thus getting their grubby mits on the perps before they actually perpetrate any wrongdoing.

Which is exactly what most Americans screamed about after 9/11.

And which is exactly what has been possible on several occasions since.

As some have already commented...
Don't worry unless you are a criminal/terrorrist.
After all - being subversive isn't enough to stop you is it? If that was the case many ATS'ers would disappear in the night on a regular basis.
The mere fact that you are allowed ATS is proof that your "Right to free speech" is being protected. Even by those who thinks you're nuts.

Miniscuzz
***snip***
Billy creates a YT account through Tor using Linux and uploads a 5 minute instructional video calling it "My thoughts on Jesus" (which most lay people would never search), then uses another burner phone to text the other 5 terrorists the link on their new burner phones.

Now, Billy has used email, YT, texts, and voice calls. All of which the NSA collected "metadata" on. I assert that without a crystal ball, NO LINK will ever, or CAN EVER be made using the data supposedly collected without MANUALLY going through every single communication worldwide by a HUMAN BEING.

If you claim otherwise, then you are a lost cause. With just a little computer knowledge, you'd understand that PRISM as claimed, is complete nonsense and is just propaganda. That is the only reasonable answer sir.

With some more computer knowledge (more than yours apparantly) we already know that Tor is no protection. People using Tor has been caught on several occasions.
We also know that it is the links that can be investigated - even if a Red Flag Word hasn't been captured during the communication.

Enven if the phones cannot directly be traced, the connections are made and there are electronic evidence of where and when.

It's like video surveillance. It doesn't stop crime - it makes it a hell of a lot easier to investigate. Which in turn makes some people think twice, which could be thought of as stopping crime, so.....

reply to post by iRoyalty


N(ephilim)
The second is Numbers 13:32–33 NAS, where the Twelve Spies report that they have seen fearsome giants in Canaan:
“ So they gave out to the sons of Israel a bad report of the land which they had spied out, saying, "The land through which we had gone, in spying it out, is a land that devours its inhabitants; and all the people whom we saw in it are men of great size. There also we saw the Nephilim (the sons of Anak are part of the Nephilim); and we became like grasshoppers in our own sight, and so we were in their sight.

S(eraphim)
Seraphs are mentioned as celestial beings in an influential Hellenistic work, the Book of Enoch, and the Book of Revelation. Tradition places seraphs in the fifth rank of ten in the Jewish angelic hierarchy and the highest rank in the Christian angelic hierarchy.


Agency-

In philosophy and sociology, agency is the capacity of an agent (a person or other entity, human or any living being in general, or soul-consciousness in religion) to act in a world. The capacity to act does not at first imply a specific moral dimension to the ability to make the choice to act, and moral agency is therefore a distinct concept. In sociology, an agent is an individual engaging with the social structure. Notably, though, the primacy of social structure vs. individual capacity with regard to persons' actions is debated within sociology. This debate concerns, at least partly, the level of reflexivity an agent may possess.[citation needed]
Agency may either be classified as unconscious, involuntary behavior, or purposeful, goal directed activity (intentional action). An agent typically has some sort of immediate awareness of his physical activity and the goals that the activity is aimed at realizing. In ‘goal directed action’ an agent implements a kind of direct control or guidance over their own behavior


No mystery.

I know more than most in the upper echelons of this hierarchy.

How?

I just do.

reply to post by Miniscuzz


The main point of your argument seems to be that Tor and the associated tools give you complete privacy. This is false, there's also a human element you're not accounting for which is a very big factor here. First of all, the ISP still records the traffic going over their servers, by NSA command, because it's encrypted (all Tor traffic) it must ALL be saved... yes this requires immense storage. They're able to link specific IP's to suspicious activity (essentially, if it's encrypted it's suspicious). When the data leaves the country, the NSA is able to record it in real time. If you study the undersea cable map you'll notice that all the cables come through a mere three points. Any data leaving the country goes through one of them which the NSA records and again filters to figure out what is and isn't interesting. With encrypted information, assuming they can't decrypt it they just save it and record where it's going, if it's over Tor that doesn't tell you much now but it can in the future once you're looking for something specific.

Next is the human element, someone is very difficult to track down if they use the various tools out there and use them properly, but just like ordinary people, most terrorists aren't super technical. How do I know this? Because I go on Tor and look at sites like SR and BMR and see what the various dealers do to protect themselves. If you pay attention to sellers you can see when people get busted, even the big sellers go down eventually. You only have to screw your security precautions up once to get nailed. Terrorists are no different in this regard from the career criminals. Everyone screws up sometime.

reply to post by Miniscuzz


No, I understand your point quite clearly. What you're failing to take into account is that there are automated ways to narrow down the data you have to look at. To put it in terms with something you should be fairly familiar with if you actually do have a computer background (I'm doubtful since you discounted applied math, and even dismiss it as being a valid technique), it's not that much different from writing a detailed query for a large database.

Using your own argument with the burner phones, you even created a pattern for them to look at in your debunking, and it's a fairly specific usage pattern at that: You're looking at recently activated phone numbers that make just a few calls, to overseas numbers, and belong to accounts that have spent under x total minutes of talk time and haven't transferred a contact list from another number. Possibly looking for calls to specific country codes only. This is an extremely narrow subset of calls and is within range of what humans can manually listen to.

With email lists you're building a similar type of query, companies like safe-mail encrypt the contents of an email (until ordered to hand it over by a warrant... of course anyone serious is sending the email double encrypted in pgp so the email providers encryption is irrelevant), however they freely hand metadata over to the feds.

You don't need, and for the most part don't even want the real names of the parties in these conversations. What you're interested in is their phone number or email address. What their real name is, is totally irrelevant until it's time to go after the person rather than get information on what they're planning. Infact, leaving data in this form without condensing it into individuals gives the agencies significant political leverage, because rather than say they've violated everyones rights to uncover 20 terrorists they can honestly say to congress, the president, and the citizens that they've found conversations between 1500 different parties, and the problem sounds much larger.

As for putting it all together, that's a challenge. You can find evidence of a plot in any conversation medium but until several conversation methods hit on the same plot you can't put them together. Basically, the problem is that they're listening to too much and don't know what they have. Ironically enough this is the EXACT SAME PROBLEM we had with 9/11 where warning alarms went off all over the place, and it was even fairly common knowledge something was going down in New York that day, but the intelligence was so bloated that it couldn't focus on it and actually get something done (this is assuming you believe the official story). 12 years, untold billions of dollars later, and after losing most of our civil liberties, we still have the exact same problem except it's of even greater magnitude now.

There's absolutely nothing surprising here. Infuriating? Sure. But that's how these people operate. They cushion the blows with time. Anyone with a brain knew intuitively they were doing this kind of stuff by 2002. Despite all the nebulous BS that surrounded the whole thing in the media.

They rarely said anything clearly but it was obvious enough they knew what was going on.

Beyond that, these people are omnipotent. They can do anything and the courts will not lift a finger to stop them. On the off chance that something like this lands in front of a judge they don't control (and it would amaze me if there's even one), they will simply change their strategy and make sure it goes before the right judge next time (or never goes before a judge again).

There are no checks and balances anymore (if they ever really existed at all). If you are a citizen of any technologically advanced country, you might as well be naked and sleeping on the ground with cameras everywhere documenting your every twitch.

If they don't record everything you do yet, it's coming. If they ever figure out how to get inside a person's mind, they'll be there too. We're nothing but property to these people.

Ok guys I have something for you to think about.
We know the NSA has not been able to stop any terrorists attacks in the US. Now that everyone knows the NSA is collecting data I would venture to say they will never be able to stop any attacks. But what do we see here, NSA and the White house going apesh*t saying they must keep collecting (Americans) data for our safety. Sounds to me like the NSA's job was never about stopping terrorists. For some reason they want to know everything about you and me. Who we call, what we say, what websites we visit, our health records and what we buy. Only thing they are missing is the color and smell of our sh*t and maybe they even have that on file for good measure. So what is their real purpose? Personally I think they are trying to profile people for some future reason or event.
Let me know what you guys think. Why is it so important for them to continue to spy and collect data on American citizens in the US.

infidel666
So what is their real purpose? Personally I think they are trying to profile people for some future reason or event.

Yeah. I think that's a good guess. I've noticed a lot of strange (highly personal) questions on forums lately. I mean, I always remember seeing the occasional personal question but these questions are different. Like "How much money do you make?" and "What do you do for a living?" and "Post a picture of your eyeball".

Such questions could be relatively innocent and obviously, they could really be coming from anyone. They're just suspicious sounding.

Frankly, I know they can spy on me if they want to but I'm not going to make it easy for them. I don't answer questions that sound really probing even if it seems innocuous.

infidel666
Ok guys I have something for you to think about.
We know the NSA has not been able to stop any terrorists attacks in the US. Now that everyone knows the NSA is collecting data I would venture to say they will never be able to stop any attacks. But what do we see here, NSA and the White house going apesh*t saying they must keep collecting (Americans) data for our safety. Sounds to me like the NSA's job was never about stopping terrorists. For some reason they want to know everything about you and me. Who we call, what we say, what websites we visit, our health records and what we buy. Only thing they are missing is the color and smell of our sh*t and maybe they even have that on file for good measure. So what is their real purpose? Personally I think they are trying to profile people for some future reason or event.
Let me know what you guys think. Why is it so important for them to continue to spy and collect data on American citizens in the US.

It's because our government has ceased to exist primarily for the benefit of the people, and now exists primarily to preserve itself. By listening to everyone, it attempts to find those that would subvert continuance of government, through terrorist acts that force policy change or open rebellion.