[timschmidt]

William Binney, former technical director of NSA disagrees: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3owk7vEEOvs

I see further down the thread you claim that surveillance data is deleted without ever being looked at. Must be why they need a half dozen gargantuan datacenters full of storage and compute.

[jeffbee]

This is the correct point of reference, but you are misinterpreting it and I urge you to think about it again. All of the government's facilities put together amount to almost nothing in the data center landscape, therefore it should be quite obvious that they certainly are not equipped to broadly intercept, store, and search "everything".

[timschmidt]

"A former senior U.S. intelligence agent described Alexander's program: "Rather than look for a single needle in the haystack, his approach was, 'Let's collect the whole haystack. Collect it all, tag it, store it ... And whatever it is you want, you go searching for it.""

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_B._Alexander#NSA_appoint...

[jeffbee]

What you're describing is a program from 20 years ago design to surveil limited parties in a limited geographic region overseas, during a war, in a place that enjoyed Stone Age information systems. That is not in the sense that the people in this discussion meant by blanket surveillance. They are talking about broad interception of all communications by U.S. persons, an undertaking that it should be obvious to you if you are in this industry would be economically if not thermodynamically impossible.

[timschmidt]

"After 9/11, they took one of the programs I had done, or the backend part of it, and started to use it to spy on everybody in this country. That was a program I created called Stellar Wind. That was seperate and compartmented from the regular activity which was ongoing because it was doing domestic spying. All the equipment was coming in, I knew something was happening but then when the contractors I had hired came and told me what they were doing, it was clear where all the hardware was going and what they were using it to do. It was simply a different input, instead of being foreign it was domestic." - William Binney

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=590cy1biewc

[jeffbee]

Civilian information systems have radically expanded in size since 2001, even if we take that ancient statement at face value. In the year 2025 it's crazy to believe that every newspaper is shouting that civilian information systems are destabilizing the national power grid and drying up the water table, but the government possesses a larger, far more capable information system that paradoxically has no observable physical presence.

[timschmidt]

"The Utah Data Center (UDC), also known as the Intelligence Community Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative Data Center, is a data storage facility for the United States Intelligence Community that is designed to store data estimated to be on the order of exabytes or larger."

"The structure provides 1 to 1.5 million sq ft (93,000 to 139,000 m2), with 100,000 sq ft (9,300 m2) of data center space and more than 900,000 sq ft (84,000 m2) of technical support and administrative space."

"The completed facility is expected to require 65 megawatts of electricity, costing about $40 million per year. Given its open-evaporation-based cooling system, the facility is expected to use 1.7 million US gal (6,400 m3) of water per day.

An article by Forbes estimates the storage capacity as between 3 and 12 exabytes as of 2013, based on analysis of unclassified blueprints, but mentions Moore's Law, meaning that advances in technology could be expected to increase the capacity by orders of magnitude in the coming years."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center

[LargoLasskhyfv]

Maybe just the metadata, of which phone-number calls which other when and where? Who messages whom by email, messenger, whatever, when and where? For the graph of communications over time, with interesting nodes appearing, showing emerging clusters around them, whose members then could be targeted by other means?

[ginush]

Yes, and this is the only feasible approach given the huge technical advances in communications over the past few decades.

[AstroNutt]

Why should they when they have access to FAANG? No need for massive data centers.

[lern_too_spel]

By access to FAANG, you mean they can issue court orders to surveil specific foreign accounts, right? Because that's what was in Snowden's docs.

[timschmidt]

"NSA Secretly Tapped Google, Yahoo Data Centers, Report Says"

https://www.networkcomputing.com/data-center-networking/nsa-...

"A striking feature of proceedings at the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) is that the executive always wins. Between 1979 and 2012—the first thirty-three years of the FISC’s existence—federal agencies submitted 33,900 ex parte requests to the court. The judges denied eleven and granted the rest: a 99.97% rate of approval."

https://www.stanfordlawreview.org/online/is-the-foreign-inte...

"The newspaper reported that in "more than a dozen classified rulings, the nation's surveillance court has created a secret body of law giving the National Security Agency the power to amass vast collections of data on Americans""

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intellig...

So, by "court order" do you mean secret law and secret trials with a history of always deciding against those who are being surveilled? Because that's what was in Snowden's docs.

[lern_too_spel]

> "NSA Secretly Tapped Google, Yahoo Data Centers, Report Says"

This was for extracting email envelope metadata to build a graph of who was contacting whom, a program that Snowden's leaks showed had already been shut down.

> "A striking feature of proceedings at the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) is that the executive always wins. Between 1979 and 2012—the first thirty-three years of the FISC’s existence—federal agencies submitted 33,900 ex parte requests to the court. The judges denied eleven and granted the rest: a 99.97% rate of approval."

What do you think the approval rate for other court orders is? It's exactly the same.

> "The newspaper reported that in "more than a dozen classified rulings, the nation's surveillance court has created a secret body of law giving the National Security Agency the power to amass vast collections of data on Americans"

This reporting was at odds with what the leaked documents said and was later walked back.

> So, by "court order" do you mean secret law and secret trials with a history of always deciding against those who are being surveilled? Because that's what was in Snowden's docs.

That explicitly was not in Snowden's docs. The law is public, and warrants are almost always granted. In this case, as Snowden's docs said, the court orders are for foreigners, living outside the U.S.

[timschmidt]

> This was for extracting email envelope metadata to build a graph of who was contacting whom, a program that Snowden's leaks showed had already been shut down.

"According to Victor Marchetti, a former special assistant to the deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), a limited hangout is "spy jargon for a favorite and frequently used gimmick of the clandestine professionals. When their veil of secrecy is shredded and they can no longer rely on a phony cover story to misinform the public, they resort to admitting—sometimes even volunteering—some of the truth while still managing to withhold the key and damaging facts in the case."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limited_hangout

In fact, NSA's own slide deck, an excerpt of which can be viewed here: https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/fiber-optic-... indicate that all Google services including Gmail, Docs, Maps, and others were subject to interception.

Additional NSA slides here: https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/new-slides-reveal-gr... detail email, chat, video, voice, photos, stored data, VoIP, file transfers, video conferencing, notifications, social networking details, and the ever ominous "Special Requests".

> What do you think the approval rate for other court orders is? It's exactly the same.

"Two wrongs make a right" is considered "one of the most common fallacies in Western philosophy".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_wrongs_don%27t_make_a_righ...

> This reporting was at odds with what the leaked documents said and was later walked back.

The linked article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intellig... contains 96 references to reporting from 2004 to 2021 from a wide variety of sources. The word "retraction" does not appear once. Among the cited sources are many examples such as:

A former federal judge who served on a secret court overseeing the National Security Agency's secret surveillance programs said Tuesday the panel is independent but flawed because only the government's side is represented effectively in its deliberations.

"Anyone who has been a judge will tell you a judge needs to hear both sides of a case," said James Robertson, a former federal district judge based in Washington who served on the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court for three years between 2002 and 2005.

https://web.archive.org/web/20130711211028/https://abcnews.g...

[mikeyouse]

Unfortunately Binney has absolutely lost it and can’t be considered credible.. literally hanging out with Alex Jones and talking about Stolen elections using math a precocious middle schooler could rebut.

His pinned Tweet is still referencing a “directed energy weapon” assassination attempt of him by the US Air Force (which took place during the Trump administration, who he was supporting, so apparently some rogue DEW plane or deep state operative?)

[timschmidt]

Every human has ideas and opinions others disagree with. However, as Technical Director and later geopolitical world Technical Director of NSA with over 30 years of SIGINT service, literally no one is in a better position to know about NSA surveillance activities.

[lern_too_spel]

He was a middle manager decades ago. Literally most intelligence people are in a better position to know about NSA surveillance activities.

[timschmidt]

"Binney was the agency official responsible for automating much of the NSA’s worldwide monitoring networks."

https://www.wired.com/2012/04/shady-companies-nsa/

[lern_too_spel]

That doesn't in any way contradict what I said. Both technology and the law changed significantly since he was a middle manager in the NSA.

[timschmidt]

It is, in fact, a direct contradiction of what you've said. There is no independently verifiable proof that NSA mass surveillance has stopped or even slowed. And a great deal of evidence to the contrary. EFF maintains a lovely list of primary sources: https://www.eff.org/nsa-spying/nsadocs#main-content