[TrueKaiser]

read this.
http://fly.hiwaay.net/~pspoole/echelon.html

[mikela]

Even before the Patriot Acts the government was spying on every manner of communication. I heard about an NSA program called 'Eschelon' back in 1999, which was a massive computer network designed to sift through telephone conversations, radio, email, and/or web pages looking for key words and combinations of words. The rumor was that the technology was not adequate to handle cell phone and email traffic, but they've had several years to perfect it since then. Our governments are spying on us. C'est la vie.

I have a very conservative friend who could never understand my unease when I mentioned this to him. "You're not a criminal, so why should you worry?" was his reasoning. I think we can believe ourselves when we say such things because our system of justice is still mostly in harmony with natural law, but that could change quickly. Unfortunately, excercising freedom of speech against our government is a real quick way of being treated like a criminal--remember that government spy infiltrating a Bakersfield peace organization in Michael Moore's Farenheit 9/11? At least they weren't prosecuted as criminals, but I think this is dependent on the attitude of the majority of citizens, which can be change if they are hungry or fearful. I think we still have some time before the government becomes a threat, perhaps longer if we can convince our friends and neighbors that it is the American Way for millions to go hungry while the rich sip wine in their chateaus. Heh, and I call myself a liberal...

[gg3]

Ahh yes, ECHELON. When I was a kid, it was HARVEST, and voice recognition was new and everyone was all excited...

NSA measures its supercomputer resources by the *acre.* Acres of Crays. Tens of acres in fact. And yet it's still not enough to handle the primary task load, much less go sniffing around for dissidents.

Now I was about to launch into a technical description of how some of this stuff works, but I have a rule against posting stuff that baddies could use. After all, for all we know, there could be one or more Al Qaeda hanging out around here, and loose lips still sink ships.

Suffice to say for now, that the backlog of intercepts is so enormous, and the task load is so large, that our various rants here are way below the threshold where they would get even a few seconds' attention. If you only knew how pissed-off the people on the ground are about not having sufficient resources to do their jobs...

The agency's internal culture is also strongly against getting involved with political goose-chases and even conventional law-enforcement actions. For example, when DEA comes around asking for intercepts on drug suspects. The agency slang for that kind of stuff is "ad-hoc requirements," meaning, "some dork from such-and-such wants us to waste CPU cycles on this or that nonsense...."

I'd suggest we have far more to fear from an uneducated electorate whose religious convictions can be manipulated by Dominionists with TV stations.

[Guest]

Do any of you guys use POPFile? http://popfile.sourceforge.net/

This is a Bayesian e-mail sorter (much more than the usual Bayesian spam sorter). It can sort all your e-mail into any number of "buckets" according to a combination of what's in the header and the body and working out the probabilities. It is remarkably successful. I have 9 buckets and it's running at >99.8% accuracy on the 400 or so e-mails I receive daily.

It would be easy for a forest of Crays with a super-POPFile to do automatic sorting of every e-mail, after decryption, with buckets ranging from "Read this immediately or sooner", "Read this now", down to "Spam". This would allow the CIA to find out important intelligence in order of priority.

The question remains: will the CIA pass it on to the Administration in a timely manner?

[Keith_McClary]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Anonymous', '
')It would be easy for a forest of Crays with a super-POPFile to do automatic sorting of every e-mail, after decryption, with buckets ranging from "Read this immediately or sooner", "Read this now", down to "Spam". This would allow the CIA to find out important intelligence in order of priority.

The question remains: will the CIA pass it on to the Administration in a timely manner?

[Riddick]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Phil', 'S')ome of you might remember the divulgence on peakoil.net in early Spring of this year that something like 30% of the hits of the previous month were from .gov and .mil domains. For some reason, within a couple weeks, that information was removed.

[Freud]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('mikela', ' ')The rumor was that the technology was not adequate to handle cell phone and email traffic, but they've had several years to perfect it since then. Our governments are spying on us. C'est la vie.

[Josephus]

Yes, we are being watched and listened to. Is there any concern? Probably not, other than the fact our rights to privacy are being subverted. I've yet to see a thread here that would draw much attention. we're here for (sometimes) intelligent discussion, planning for, and working on ways around and about PO. There is some down with the government, anti-NWO sentiment floating around, even in my own posts. But nothing that could compare to much more subversive groups.

But until we know for sure, just act normal. Icks-nay on-yay uh-thay end-yay of-ey uh-thay urld-way alk-tay. And pass me my aluminum foil hat.

[gg3]

Guest, even with a few more decimal places of accuracy, what you have is still a *huge* pile of stuff that ultimately has to be examined by humans, and a small number of humans to do the examining.

Do you have any idea of the sheer volume of voice and data traffic crossing the US daily...?

The people who do the collection & processing are, as someone mentioned, career military & civil service. They are far more moderate as a whole, than the present administration. Think of organizational inertia. The great thing about bureaucracies (yes, I'm serious) is that they are inherently conservative, in the sense of being resistant to change. This simple fact may end up being what saves the republic from the wackos.