posted July 31, 2013 02:42 PM            

The system requires an email because many behaviors online are completely anonymous and it is only via some sort of identifier – a username and domain – that the system can scour the database of collected Internet traffic and metadata.

As Snowden said to the Guardian on June 10, “I, sitting at my desk could wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge or even the president, if I had a personal email.” X-Keyscore is how it is done.

KS1

The system is available to NSA analysts and can be accessed without a warrant. According to training manuals produced in 2010, the system requires analysts to request data on certain individuals. The system then scans traffic beginning and terminating the United States using keyword searches. The system can also search Facebook comments as well as other social media data.

XKeyscore map

The data is not permanent. Because the system gathers billions of records a day the database can store it for at most a few days. The NSA claims that these searches, which can pinpoint communications between people online and over the phone and find mention of certain terms and names in blog posts, emails, and other shared content, are completely audited and are aimed at overseas targets – although American nationals are often swept in during the intelligence gathering.

posted August 02, 2013 07:50 AM            

Totally.

posted August 03, 2013 09:39 PM            

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It appears that the police now have a device that can read license plates and check if a car is unregistered, uninsured or stolen. We already know that the National Security Agency can dip into your Facebook page and Google searches. And it seems that almost every store we go into these days wants your home phone number and ZIP code as part of any transaction.

So when Edward Snowden -- now cooling his heels in Russia -- revealed the extent to which the NSA is spying on Americans, collecting data on phone calls we make, it's not as if we should have been surprised. We live in a world that George Orwell predicted in "1984." And that realization has caused sales of the 1949, dystopian novel to spike dramatically upward recently -- a 9,000% increase at one point on Amazon.com.

Comparisons between Orwell's novel about a tightly controlled totalitarian future ruled by the ubiquitous Big Brother and today are, in fact, quite apt. Here are a few of the most obvious ones.

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Btw, I vaguely recall years ago (Bush still POTUS) that a librarian told me that her library had refused a FBI or other government request for the name of all patrons who checked out 1984...

Oh, and another librarian also checked the computers looking for anyone tapping into their network through a lappie (as many liked to do) and found the FBI was tapped in, so he put up notices with IP address and everything he was able to get...and apparently enough patrons started doing searches on the spy cracked into their system that they gave up and it all became dead.

posted August 06, 2013 04:03 PM            

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Originally posted by Randall:
Haha! Good stuff! Librarians are tough!

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It's true. A well educated librarian will have a better than working knowledge of the history of censorship, free speech, blacklisting, and the like. This will change of course.