Paul Waldman has a brief perspective this morning,
on how people around the world feel about the NSA spying issue, here where refers to some other specific
stories. But he skips the enormous story
Sunday July 6 by Barton Gellman, Julie Tate and Askkan Soltani, “Caught in the
NSA net: Intercepts mostly from non-targets; ordinary web users’ data dominates
collection”, here. Generally, as reported before, the NSA has been using the more lenient
standards of PRISM to go after data when it doesn’t have time for FISA court
supervision.
The circumstance that seems to lead to extraneous
collection is an “ordinary” person’s calling or texting a number on a target
list (often overseas), or possibly answering emails, forwarding or responding
to tweets or other social media posts of targets, or sometimes visiting certain
websites. The story mentioned the
collections of selfie photos, family pictures, resumes, job applications, even medical history or perhaps psychiatric information. But the case histories of actual collections
seem to involve individuals incidental to foreign persons under big-time
surveillance because of (usually) radical Islamic activities or sometimes hacking
or organized crime in places like China and Russia.
Personal blog posts are probably culled. Since mine are public, that’s fine with
me. Maybe the NSA has the unusual email
sent to my AOL account Aug. 15, 2008 by activists in Nigeria threatening to
attack oil fields (I don’t think it’s spam).
I reported it publicly (on the International Issues blog) , and the
government (as are oil companies) is free to use it and correlate the info as
it likes.
CNN discusses the story this AM (related link), and still expresses concern that someone can wind up on a no-fly list
without recourse. It gave one obscure example. There does need to be Congressional
oversight. I did not fly from late 2006
until mid 2011, and I didn’t fly in 2012 (I did a plane trip to Atlanta
recently). Something could happen behind my own back. CNN expects more users to want to use end-to-end encryption, as offered recently by Google.
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