The ultimate goal of the NSA is total population control

www.theguardian.com...

At least 80% of all audio calls, not just metadata, are recorded and stored in the US, says whistleblower William Binney – that's a 'totalitarian mentality'

William Binney is one of the highest-level whistleblowers to ever emerge from the NSA. He was a leading code-breaker against the Soviet Union during the Cold War but resigned soon after September 11, disgusted by Washington’s move towards mass surveillance.

On 5 July he spoke at a conference in London organised by the Centre for Investigative Journalism and revealed the extent of the surveillance programs unleashed by the Bush and Obama administrations.

“At least 80% of fibre-optic cables globally go via the US”, Binney said. “This is no accident and allows the US to view all communication coming in. At least 80% of all audio calls, not just metadata, are recorded and stored in the US. The NSA lies about what it stores.”

The NSA will soon be able to collect 966 exabytes a year, the total of internet traffic annually. Former Google head Eric Schmidt once argued that the entire amount of knowledge from the beginning of humankind until 2003 amount to only five exabytes.

Binney, who featured in a 2012 short film by Oscar-nominated US film-maker Laura Poitras, described a future where surveillance is ubiquitous and government intrusion unlimited.

Total control you say? No way?

Don't bother hating on just Obama or Bush because they are mere puppets parading around while the agendas continue to work against the public behind the scenes.

I hope their collective heads never stop hurting from listening to the banal chatter of the masses.

The real problem comes when they send SWAT teams to your house at 6 in the morning to terrorize you for having a few grams of some illegal substance lying around. How many cops need to be shot in the face during no-knock raids before cops get harder to source?

I'm asking this because we may just need these statistics, sooner rather than later.

a reply to: Swills

Strong message. To those who've said here that "they need to have a search warrant" nonsense...needs to understand they ARE listening and monitoring us...they HAVE been for a very long time...and they certainly don't NEED or WILL GET in fact...any "warrant" before they listen to, record and save our messages, searches, phone calls and emails.

To believe they can't do this...is plain stupidity. We knew what they've been up to for years while so many young people today naively and erroneously think they cant. They can and will and do...and they will never realize it...because right now? They don't.

a reply to: mysterioustranger

This is a much wider problem that just our personal sh-t.

This is paranoia at its height. Personally if someone wants to listen to my calls to my family and loved ones, rants to which ever service provided has messed up Bl--dy good luck to you, I hope you die of boredom listening and your ears and b-lls drop off.

What bugs me though is the spying capability on people's research and industrial secrets - this must give American corporations a huge advantage for stealing a run on an upcoming patent etc. I suspect that is something that Angela M from Germany has the grumps about - with due cause. Surely we aren't all happy with this spying and isn't it time time we made inroads at letting our political representatives know our disapproval and demand for this spying on us to stop. We have elections coming soon and should make this an issue with whoever wants our votes. We have power, we just don't appear to know it.

I know the UK is backing the USA from our specialist monitoring services and again it simply shows how terrified of the public the elite and greedy actually are. I do suppose though it gives us ample opportunity to feed misinformation into their piggy ears. This type of behaviour by governments spying and authorising laws for their personal corporations as though they are charities is not democratic and is not healthy for society either. If society doesn't respect its politicians and institutions then eventually the institutions and policians will loose out.

a reply to: Swills

The NSA is a bigger threat to our security than any terrorist. We already KNOW the NSA is breaking the law.

a reply to: Swills

My question would be how do they sift through all of it, of course much of it can be used as meta-data to reveal overall statistics yet how much the Nsa knows about each of us puzzles me.

I wonder if an advanced program or even AI would be capable of compiling and linking the personal data that we each produce so that it can then be used for further statistics, investigation or even as a spring board for a file on the person that they concern.

a reply to: Swills

This is complete nonsense. I truly feel like it is 1984 already. Go to ANY American intersection and see at LEAST 8 cameras. 4 of these cameras will always be pointed into the windshield of coming cars (for facial recognition, and tracking our driving habits.) The other 4 are trained at the licence plates and the pedestrians.

Any call I make, any text I send, any email I open, I know the NSA has already logged it into their files...

And another poster said it, they do not need warrants anymore. If they want somebody, simply call up the NSA to find the tiniest illegal act they may have committed and boom swat raid. Then the local PD will say they found out by watching you, when in reality they are lying that the NSA gave it to em. The NSA has probably near every single American caught in at LEAST one lie or law breaking.

a reply to: DodgyDawg

I think they are trying to do exactly what you suggest. IMO, they are attempting to build a 'real-time grid' if you will of people's locations and probably 'future crimes' etc. Just think if they could manage to map out every single American's personal connections. They could in theory create a network of sorts that predicts behavior and the like...

a reply to: DodgyDawg

Oh god yes. With the amount of data they're collecting they're gonna need more than super computers and advanced algorithm programs, they're gonna need AI. And I don't think we're too far off from having it. By the NSA takes complete control of all electronic data AI will be announced. Who knows, it may already exist since we never know exactly how advanced some military's, private sectors, and gov'ts technology are.

The NSA is already and has been spying on your snail mail.

Sad truth to this is I doubt we're ever gonna see a reversal of this spying. Even if the people protest in the millions like the Egyptians did last year I would suspect a major false flag caused by some terrorist group. ISIS already has their hands on 88lbs of uranium they recently stole from an Iraqi university.

This is one reason to avoid closed and controlled software from big companies who for sure has NSA roots in. I do not live in US but one i can tell that even NSA roots have reached here and little bit of FSB too.

The Creepy, Long-Standing Practice of Undersea Cable Tapping

In the early 1970's, the U.S. government learned that an undersea cable ran parallel to the Kuril Islands off the eastern coast of Russia, providing a vital communications link between two major Soviet naval bases. The problem? The Soviet Navy had completely blocked foreign ships from entering the region.

Not to be deterred, the National Security Agency launched Operation Ivy Bells, deploying fast-attack submarines and combat divers to drop waterproof recording pods on the lines. Every few weeks, the divers would return to gather the tapes and deliver them to the NSA, which would then binge-listen to their juicy disclosures.

A subsidiary program for these operations -- Tempora -- sucks up around 21 million gigabytes per day and stores the data for a month. The data is shared with NSA, and there are reportedly 550 NSA and GCHQ analysts poring over the information they've gathered from at least 200 fiber optic cables so far.

Tempora

Tempora is the codeword for a formerly secret computer system that is used by the British Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ). This system is used to buffer internet communications that are extracted from fibre-optic cables, so these can be processed and searched.[2] It was tested since 2008 and became operational in the autumn of 2011.

TEMPORA comprises different components, like the actual access points to fiber-optic cables, a sanitisation program codenamed POKERFACE, the XKEYSCORE system developed by NSA, and a Massive Volume Reduction (MVR) capability

XKeyscore

XKeyscore is considered a "passive" program, in that it listens, but does not transmit anything on the networks that it targets.[5] But it can trigger other systems, which perform "active" attacks through Tailored Access Operations which are "tipping", for example the Quantum family of programs, including Quantuminsert, Quantumhand, Quantumtheory, Quantumbot and Quantumcopper and Turbulence (NSA). These run at so-called "defensive sites" including the Ramstein Air Force base in Germany, Yokota Air Base in Japan, and numerous military and non-military locations within the US. Trafficthief, a core program of Turbulence, can alert NSA analysts when their targets communicate, and trigger other software programs, so select data is "promoted" from the local XKeyscore data store to the NSA's "corporate repositories" for long term storage.

I think that motto, "We Are Not Alone" was meant to describe Big Brother instead of aliens.

a reply to: Swills

If we put ourselves in the shoes of the NSA bosses, it actually makes perfect sense that they'd listen to and store all the data they can access. To draw lines in the sand or set moral boundaries isn't a practical stance when their goal is ensuring the US is stable and gaining advantages over all other nations - 'full spectrum domination' was how Rumsfeld once phrased it (iirc).

The mentality of a good intelligence agent (or agency) would never be able to say, 'No thanks, that'd be great information, but it's a little intrusive.'

Ironically, it doesn't seem to have helped the business prospects of the US these past few years. Likewise, there doesn't appear to be much of an advantage being held over ME states, countries and groups. That suggests they may well have more data coming in than they can reasonably hope to manage or understand.

However, I can't help thinking that this situation cannot continue indefinitely. There must come a tipping point where either countries or civilians lose their trust in the US in the face of ever more intrusions. Some will distrust the States and others will seek to match the NSA in data-collection in an ever-escalating conflict that is no longer about protecting the people of their nations.

Logically, it can't continue and yet how will it end? Either outcome will invoke a lot of international turmoil.

a reply to: Swills

I find that most of these responses and even the OP concern themselves only with the impact upon the US. That is foolish given what we already know about the NSA capabilities. They are out to collect all of the world's electronic data. There is no reason to doubt but what they have that capability multiple times over what has been revealed. We are being told about on the tip of the iceberg of capabilities. What about our abilities to eavesdrop on China. What have we heard about that? Virtually nothing, but German, Venezuela, Sweden etc.we know about a little, dirty business there. But what about China? Are not they considered to be our possibly worst enemy? What does Snowden's releases tell up about China? Something smells with this business. Is it all an elaborate facade hiding a joint program by a multitude of nations but with the US lending its weight of technology and plain ol' dollars to make the best damned spy system the world will ever know?

While it would benefit for the spy agency of any one country to rake in all of the data from around the globe solely for themselves, it justs doesn't seem likely that such an enormous effort would be done unless that data had a larger purpose beyond that agency creating the network unless there were other key issues and major players, helpmates providing of access, etc.

My personal position is that the nations of the world have few real enemies among themselves except for the terrorists of a particular religious bent that want to destroy everything and they will if they allowed to expand. Russia, China, India and other countries have a potentially very serious problems that can blow up in their faces anyday now. The NSA with its finger in every pie would love to see Russian and China at least get torn up, but if so, what would be the future if a new nation of terrorist rose in their place with nuclear weapons, vast resources, etc.? That puts the US/NSA in a unique position of striking political bargains with any or all of these other countries to get a leg up on their domestic terrorist orgs. It would not be so much as "Let us steal your info and be quiet about it," as it would be "We are stealing your info and you be quiet about it if you want intelligence relative to your situation."

If that is not reason enough for nations to cooperate, suppose there is a large, over-riding reason known full well in all of those countries that there is a larger plan in the works and that total surveillance of their populations (such as is possible and necessary) will be a welcomed tool for them to have. That plan would be the further establishment of the NWO which is no longer a pie in the sky dream but a system fostered in Europe and destined to grow by hook or crook around the world even as its preliminary efforts are faltering. (Which is also a sign that better control is required even within such a "united" system.) The NWO must have a network of control in effect before its sets itself into serious motion around the world. NSA can provide the intelligence for that control.

a reply to: Kandinsky

That's exactly what our long standing whistle blower has been saying. Totalitarian bosses who would never say no to spying. Truth is, all spy agencies, foreign foe or ally, spy on each other, but they spied on each other, not the entire population. All this spying and total control of our information is stopping what? Why do they need OUR information? What info could we possibly give them? There is NOTHING great about our illegally spied on information. At best they might be able to stop a "homegrown terrorist" who is dumb enough to join the jihad via the internet.

Angels do not run our Gov't/Military, and never will, especially now with all this power and coming soon... control!

Just because they can doesn't mean they should, and its very sad our federal judges won't shut them down. All in the name of the farce that is National Security.

It's all bullspit, and spying on over 300 million Americans isn't gonna stop or slow our so called War on Terror, nor will it prevent terrorist attacks. Unfortunately the real terrorists are very good with their electronic communications but lets focus on you and store and waste time sifting through your data. National Security and all.

originally posted by: Swills
Former Google head Eric Schmidt once argued...

Did this guy really say that? As far as I know, Schmidt is still the head of Google. But then, it's the NSA. Maybe they've been listening in on Larry Page and heard him say Schmidt was on his way out!

There is concern about just how disciplined this data will be used. It is a lot of power to have over someone which could be used for good or bad. How are conflicts of interest managed?

a persons (or group entities) judgement is only as good as the information they have
in the ongoing quest to control everything, all this info is a goldmine..

how else are they going to develop those theme-parks of the future, calculate how many toilets to install, how many cubit feet of hotdog vendors & coke machines are needed and so on?

a reply to: signalfire

"How many cops need to be shot in the face during no-knock raids before cops get harder to source?"

I imagine that any and all Police bursting into your home at 6am deserve to be shot in the face! If that sounds harsh to some its because they obviously have no experience first hand regarding Police brutality or the illegal manner in which they so often carry out their agenda.

originally posted by: Metallicus
We already KNOW the NSA is breaking the law.

They all are ... all through Washington ... all through the leaderships around the world everywhere. The Earth is a tribal lawless deadly mess.

originally posted by: FlyersFan

originally posted by: Metallicus
We already KNOW the NSA is breaking the law.

They all are ... all through Washington ... all through the leaderships around the world everywhere. The Earth is a tribal lawless deadly mess.

And knows no bounds! Sadly the window of opportunity to change this has long since passed. The program is operational and the extent to get there was tremendous that there is no way on gods green earth will they ever turn the switch off. Orwell is here to stay.