[ZakCarter]

You might have seen the headlines this week—the NSA is no longer collecting your data.

But is that true?

What is it that the NSA can no longer do, and who is doing it for them?

This is a Reality Check you won’t see anywhere else!

Can't watch the video? Read the transcript @ http://truthinmedia.com/reality-check/




For Truth!

[blackjack21]

Of course they haven't. They can still just dump byte streams. Additionally, Obama probably won't enforce the law anyway.

Collection of metadata is basically all calls:

1. caller
1a. Caller identity
1b. Caller location
2. receiver
2a. Receiver identity
2b. Receiver location
3. duration

Along with identity is billing information, which is usually residential. So they know who you call, when you call them, and how long the call takes. From that, they can build histograms, calling patterns, etc. A calls B; then, B calls C. Etc. Since each phone number is a unique ID, it lends itself to graph theory. So you can diagram nodes and vertices very easily. They can pick up relays, etc. very easily with this type of information. However, most of it is useless for fighting terrorism, as 99.9% of people aren't terrorists. The reason there is opposition from the political right is that Obama has massively abused power against conservative and Republican donors using the IRS and other agencies--probably using NSA data too. So there is no trust on the right now. The reason there is opposition from the political left is that if it's not them doing the spying, they are afraid of what it reveals about them.

For metadata collection to be really valuable, you do need profiling. It's also not that easy to put pieces together.

Take the movie Zero Dark Thirty as an example. The theory of Six Degrees of Separation is demonstrated here. First, you torture names out of people; then, you can match the names to metadata. Even before Snowden, though, terrorists knew to use pre-paid phones. So name metadata was useless. So what they had to do was to find a static receiver--a call recipient that doesn't change. In that case, it was the terrorist's mother. Terrorist loves mama. So once they identified him by torturing others, they then had to identify his mother, because he was smart enough not to use the same phone. Then, they bribed someone to get momma's phone number. When terrorist calls mama, they can reverse lookup the caller and establish a location. With the location data, they could trace where he was when he made his calls. From that pattern, they finally located the terrorist's actual position and followed him back to bin Laden's hideout. That's what led to Zero Dark Thirty and capturing bin Laden.

The thing is, that took torture, bribery and ten years of piecing it all together.

The NSA can still do all that, but they can't collect all data on all Americans right now.

There are valid reasons to support metadata collection--e.g., domestic terrorism, human trafficking and drug cartels are a big factor. That gets crippled, because nobody trusts Obama, and as well they shouldn't.