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originally posted by: marg6043
a reply to: MystikMushroom
Trust me you count, we all count, the habits of consumers, counts, that is the data mine part of it, because they also collect data for propaganda advertisement among many others targets that can be sold
originally posted by: WeAre0ne
a reply to: jimmyx
Here is one for you... LEDs can be used as cameras (kinda). So perhaps those LED displays and TVs are doubling as cameras and we don't realize it.
Turning LEDs Into A Camera
originally posted by: marg6043
a reply to: MystikMushroom
Trust me you count, we all count, the habits of consumers, counts, that is the data mine part of it, because they also collect data for propaganda advertisement among many others targets that can be sold
originally posted by: WeAre0ne
Funny they call it "Google for voice" because with Google you can create a free "Google Voice" account, and you will get a free phone number which you can then use to forward calls to any of your real phone numbers. You also get a Google voicemail, which will transcribe the voice messages into text and send it to you in email if you ever miss a call, which you can then search for. Pretty much the same tech that NSA is talking about.
originally posted by: N3k9Ni
I don't think there's much to worry about as far as transcribing phone calls to text. I have a Google voice account that attempts to transcribe phone messages to text. Most times the text is so unintelligible that I have no idea what the message is without listening to the actual recording.
originally posted by: WeAre0ne
a reply to: jimmyx
Here is one for you... LEDs can be used as cameras (kinda). So perhaps those LED displays and TVs are doubling as cameras and we don't realize it.
originally posted by: MystikMushroom
I'll say this once again...
The NSA is buried under an avalanche of data to the point where it's paralyzed. Right now, the predictive computational power isn't available to make use of the information. The information is only valuable if you have a specific person of interest, or want to investigate someone after they commit a crime.
The NSA suffers from the "False Positive Paradox"
The false positive paradox is a statistical result where false positive tests are more probable than true positive tests, occurring when the overall population has a low incidence of a condition and the incidence rate is lower than the false positive rate. The probability of a positive test result is determined not only by the accuracy of the test but by the characteristics of the sampled population
Here's an example using the fictional "Super AIDS" to demonstrate how the false positive paradox works:
Say you have a new disease, called Super-AIDS. Only one in a million people gets Super-AIDS. You develop a test for Super-AIDS that's 99 percent accurate. I mean, 99 percent of the time, it gives the correct result -- true if the subject is infected, and false if the subject is healthy. You give the test to a million people.
One in a million people have Super-AIDS. One in a hundred people that you test will generate a "false positive" -- the test will say he has Super-AIDS even though he doesn't. That's what "99 percent accurate" means: one percent wrong. What's one percent of one million? 1,000,000/100 = 10,000 One in a million people has Super-AIDS. If you test a million random people, you'll probably only find one case of real Super-AIDS. But your test won't identify one person as having Super-AIDS. It will identify 10,000 people as having it. Your 99 percent accurate test will perform with 99.99 percent inaccuracy.
That's the paradox of the false positive. When you try to find something really rare, your test's accuracy has to match the rarity of the thing you're looking for. If you're trying to point at a single pixel on your screen, a sharp pencil is a good pointer: the pencil-tip is a lot smaller (more accurate) than the pixels. But a pencil-tip is no good at pointing at a single atom in your screen. For that, you need a pointer -- a test -- that's one atom wide or less at the tip.
Here is an application to terrorism:
Terrorists are really rare. In a city of twenty million like New York, there might be one or two terrorists, maybe up to ten. 10/20,000,000 = 0.00005 percent, one twenty-thousandth of a percent. That's pretty rare. Now, say you have software that can sift through all the bank-records, or toll-pass records, or public transit records, or phone-call records in the city and catch terrorists 99 percent of the time. In a pool of twenty million people, a 99 percent accurate test will identify two hundred thousand people as being terrorists. But only ten of them are terrorists. To catch ten bad guys, you have to investigate two hundred thousand innocent people.
Wikipedia
OP Source
The USA Freedom Act — the surveillance reform bill that Congress is currently debating — doesn’t address the topic at all. The bill would end an NSA program that does not collect voice content: the government’s bulk collection of domestic calling data, showing who called who and for how long.
The bill passed out of the House Judiciary Committee on April 30, 2015
originally posted by: BrianFlanders
I've always been suspicious of Snowden. Really. What has he told us we couldn't already guess? About the only thing he's done that would have been difficult to do any other way was he managed to get the public to actually think about this stuff.
originally posted by: Aazadan
Snowden didn't tell us new information, he did something of even greater impact. He provided actual proof that everything people thought was going on was. From a legal standpoint there is a massive difference between what you accuse someone of and what you can prove someone guilty of. Snowden proved allegations that have been made for over a decade. That is a very big deal.
.........
Also, while the general public has been largely clueless as to what Snowden revealed those in the know such as the tech industry have responded. It has lead to new security practices and new issues from corporate lobbyists. It has also caused members of congress to come forward and reveal where they stand on such things.