What really is the truth now?

[YeahSureRight]

That is what this whole NSA, PRISM, Metadata search faux scandal is all about….disinformation to keep the people confused.

Who is lying?

Who is telling the truth?

News is now pretty much just corporate and political disinformation campaigns. It is intentional to keep you and me from the truth about what is really happening.

Only the naive and foolish will believe anything they read/see on the news anymore or the BS spewed by our so-called leaders.

Of every event that makes the news ask yourself “Who profits/gains from this?”

Once you have the answer you will be closer to the truth.

Those who are not really interested in the truth will believe the BS they read/see on the TV/internet or called news or the BS our leaders spew.

Unless one is at the center of events you have no idea what the real truth is only what others tell you the truth is.

[randome]

1. Of course you can never KNOW who is telling the truth.

So you look at evidence. Absent evidence, you look at character, motivations.

So far there is no evidence that the NSA is 'watching our thoughts form as we type' as Snowden says.

So far there is no evidence that the NSA is downloading the Internet on a daily basis as he implied.

But there is evidence that Snowden did not have the access he claimed or he would have furnished us with something to support his claims.

There is evidence that Snowden doesn't understand that 'direct access' most likely means secure FTP servers.

So, weighing all the evidence (or the lack of it), it doesn't seem like much to get upset about.

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[YeahSureRight]

5. You think you know the truth when infact the only truth you know is what tey tell you

Unless you are working inside the NSA you don't know jack about what really is going on just what you are told.

NSA stands for No Such Agency and even those who really work within the NSA only know a portion of the truth.

Believe what you want, but if you are not questioning everyone and everything you are not interested in the truth only the truth you want to hear which is where most people stop seeking the truth.

Our Government Lies and is very good at it. You want to believe the Government go right ahead.

No I am not paranoid nor conspiracy theorist, just a truth seeker who has direct knowledge and been involved in activities that the Government lied about.

Do you even know what a secret really is? Ever work with TS and Above info? Been involved with classification of data? Having had all that experience I can tell you disinformation is a large part of what is publically released. It is intentional to lull you back to sleep.

[randome]

8. I'm less inclined to believe anything Snowden says.

This is the guy who said "I'm not trying to hide from justice here" from his undisclosed location in Hong Kong.

This is the guy who couldn't be bothered to get anything more damning than a PowerPoint slide to support his claims. And then misinterpreted that.

I'll believe anything he says if he shows evidence. So far, there is none so why should I be upset with the NSA?

No, I have never had TS clearance. What does that have to do with anything? I'll still judge based on the evidence and so far there is none.

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[WovenGems]

11. I know

computers and what they can and can't do. From that knowledge alone I can shoot down many of the conspiracy theories.

There's no such thing as magic and there's no such thing as AI.

[YeahSureRight]

15. What I know is that I used to operate a system that could listen, identify, locate

source of and record any RF transmission.

People would not believe what I could and did listen too.

If a Gov intel capability is released publically they have something better in place already that we don’t know about.

[WovenGems]

18. Thank you

That point where you listened is where the warrant comes in. The system can look for key words or phrases but can't alert and say "I may have found something".

[YeahSureRight]

23. When I left that job 20 years ago they were already starting to work

on computer aided search and alert capability.

I would bet the capability exists and is operational already and has been for sometime now.

[Pholus]

9. Well, we can look at the evidence of course...

LIST OF PRIMARY EVIDENCE (from US government claims, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/10/nsa-spying-scandal-what-we-have-learned)

a) VERIZON METADATA

I see estimates of a trillion phone calls per year in the US. If each call has 80 characters of "metadata" (number called, duration, only a couple other things as we've been told), 80 trillion bytes would be 80 Terabytes/year. This "database" would easily sit 4-5 blade servers in someone's office. Furthermore if we are to trust what we were told just this week, only 300 numbers were targeted. My personal research data takes 20 TB so I can say with certainty that the project officially described is easily capable of being run out of a single office room on a single server by a team of 4-6 people.

This number is completely consistent with other estimates (the guy who runs the Internet Archive, for example) who says even content is not that expensive to store.

http://blog.archive.org/2013/06/15/cost-to-store-all-us-phonecalls-made-in-a-year-in-cloud-storage-so-it-could-be-datamined/

b) BOUNDLESS INFORMANT

Another metadata project, but basically traffic analysis from computer networks... By these numbers, it is similar in scope to the VERIZON estimate I made:

"A fact sheet leaked to the Guardian explains that almost 3bn pieces of intelligence had been collected from US computer networks in the 30-day period ending in March this year, as well as indexing almost 100bn pieces worldwide. "

So 36 billion US bits of metadata and 1.2 Trillion worldwide metadata entries. Scales pretty much like VERIZON, so add another office, another server (which fits in the same rack as the first one) and another 4-6 people.

c) PRISM

All foreign communication (emails, chat logs, other data from nine internet companies). From http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/jun/7/prism-used-collect-personal-web-data-clapper-says/ we find a mathematician, William Binney who estimates (yeah, guesses) PRISM has 20 trillion emails/phone calls. At 100k/email (http://searchengineland.com/google-web-report-average-page-size-320-kb-46316) and 3 MB/phone call (3 min average per http://adraughtofvintage.com/2012/05/07/average-length-of-local-cell-phone-call-in-2003-was-3-min-in-2010-its-1-min-47-sec/) and estimating about a 10-1 ratio (going by http://www.cisco.com/en/US/solutions/collateral/ns341/ns525/ns537/ns705/ns827/white_paper_c11-481360_ns827_Networking_Solutions_White_Paper.html and comparing to a phone traffic average above) we come up with an estimated size of about 10 exabytes.

Old estimates (2008) indicate that 2 exabytes could be done in 40,000 square feet of server space per http://storagemojo.com/2008/10/12/building-a-18-exabyte-data-center/ and we need five times that, but racks and disk capacity have improved by about the same proportion -- So PRISM sits (at Fort Meade?) in a single storage facility. http://singularityhub.com/2009/11/03/enter-the-yottabyte-one-billion-petabytes/ estimates that Google stores on the order of exabytes in a single data center. So PRISM is a single data center.

SO -- IF IT STOPPED WITH WHAT WE WERE OFFICIALLY TOLD THAT WOULD BE IT IT WOULD FIT IN A SINGLE COMPLEX

1) Why do we need a bunch of new multi-billion buildings in Utah capable of holding AT A MINIMUM 5 zettabytes (10 years of ALL TRAFFIC by a quick pencil and paper calculation) up through "yottabytes" if the program truly is this small?

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

This is an expansion of the capacity at San Antonio, Fort Meade, Fort Gordon in Georgia, NSA Hawaii. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Agency

2) Why are there stories about the U.S. government being interested in all kinds of commercial databases?

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-06-14/u-s-agencies-said-to-swap-data-with-thousands-of-firms.html

3) Why does a quick perusal of the DARPA website talk about opportunities to do "anomaly detection" in massive databases.

http://www.darpa.mil/Our_Work/I2O/Programs/Anomaly_Detection_at_Multiple_Scales_%28ADAMS%29.aspx

CONCLUSION

Someone, somewhere made the successful sales pitch to these guys that you could build a system like the ones we see on CSI on teevee. When you know the name of the bad guy, just press a button and those massive floor to ceiling monitors on the "command center" wall pops up their picture and every significant bit of data ever collected on that person like you'd had a gumshoe on their tails for a decade. Worse, there are probably promises that you can take all that data, put it in a pot, wave a magic wand and out pops all the bad guys (people who don't fit the mean behaviors of the population). Once again, we are all suspects who will need to prove our innocence rather than them proving our guilt.

At the very least there is far more capacity available than publically disclosed uses.

[randome]

10. The potential for abuse is always present.

Let's put in more protections, more transparency. It still doesn't mean anything Snowden is saying has merit.

And I have no idea why they are building such a massive data center. We should press them to find that out.

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[Pholus]

13. The potential for abuse is mitigated if there is a forced disposal of information.

Something like 36 months without a court-granted exception.

The idea of lifelong surveillance with permanent records will be the death of democracy in this country. Even the threat of terrorism pales compared to that.

[randome]

17. I don't see storing numbers as 'lifelong surveillance' but yeah, I can see the need for disposal.

I would think it should be more than 36 months. The telecoms probably retain the data for a few years so maybe 5 years at NSA. Even mandating that the telecoms dispose of their data on the same schedule.

But whatever it would be, run a purge job every morning, case closed.

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[Pholus]

20. You're damned by your associates in those "numbers"

Being a normal, non-peeping tom, sort of person I had never gotten into the math. I guess I should not be surprised how simple a basic analysis is but from this blog post I can fully believe the occasional NSA operative who boasts that they do not NEED the content.

http://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013/06/09/using-metadata-to-find-paul-revere/

Who you talk to defines who you are. Plain and simple. And you can be profiled or loyalty-ranked from that.

So please STOP claiming there is no value in the "numbers." In the end, it is a simple query to a publically available phone database to link the name to the number. I am not a computer scientist and I still know what a federated database is.

[graham4anything]

2. Truth-one side does not want the democratic party to keep the senate. Truth-Ed Markey for Senate

falsehood- both sides are the same

Ask the republicantealibertarian party that yesterday voted to pass a new abortion law restricting a constitutional right of privacy even more.

Fact-the BushPaulFamilyinc will NOT get a democratic supported anything they desire when they take America back to 1859 if they get the chance.

FACT-SCOTUS-two justices most likely to retire the soonest are LIBERAL justices
False- Rand Paul would vote for another Ginsberg and Breyer. Ah, no, he would not. Rand Paul would vote for Robert Bork
Samuel ALito, John Roberts, Antonin Scalia and Harriett Miers had he had a chance. (of course Bush only picked Miers knowing she would not be voted on, so he could get Samuel Alito(perhaps the single worst justice on the current court for a democratic supporter)
through. Remember, Bush had to name a woman first as it was O'Connor's seat, so what did he do? He named one so unqualified his own party said no, and Bush won the gamble he set out to do in the first place.

[geckosfeet]

3. Fact: Our nation has codified a privacy ethic known as the fourth amendment.

Fact: Our own government has circumvented the fourth amendment (see buSh/chenEy for details)

The rest is hyperbole and circumnavigation.

[YeahSureRight]

6. It really is just a piece of parchment with old faded words written on it now nothing more.

[geckosfeet]

7. Then the truth is relative.

[YeahSureRight]

21. Of course it is relative

Our Constitution was written by terrorists from the British POV.

Is that the truth?

12 years ago our leaders sold us out with the Patriot Act but most think it was PBO’s original idea to data mine hell almost 60% of 'mericans are a-ok with it.

Does majority rule now?

[geckosfeet]

27. Correct on al counts.

[KurtNYC]

4. Events can not be lied about -- for example if gasoline goes up then we all know

that the price of gas went up.

But what CAN be lied about is why and our understanding (or mis-understanding) of why something happened leads us toward a set of actions which we believe will correct the situation or prevent another one, etc.

IMHO when sorting out the facts, it pays to focus on events and people's actions rather than press releases, scripted speeches and talking point based cable news.

[The Link]

12. I tend to not trust bought and paid for politicians.

[el_bryanto]

14. Figure out what the worst is and imagine things are 3.4 times worse than that.

It's simple. And anybody who disagrees with you is either an Obama apologist or tragically naive.

Bryant

[Puzzledtraveller]

16. 2+2=4

But we are being told 2+2=5, and it is we who are mistaken.

[kentuck]

19. Truth is like pornography.

You will know it when you see it.

[rurallib]

22. My method for discerning truth - it is the polar opposite of whatever republicans say

[Whisp]

24. my bet is that the Ron Pauler is lying. n/t

[sibelian]

25. A sprkly wibbly wobbly thing IN THE MIDDLE of soemthing else.

Somehow it's always in "the middle". Loads of people tell me so, so it must be true.

Ooooh, wait a minute. If I think the truth ISN'T in the middle but is WAY WAY WAY OVER THERE and someone else says it IS in the middle, does that mean the truth is between the middle and WAY WAY WAY OVER THERE?

Hmmmmm, conundrum.

HEY! If I just keep saying the truth is WAY WAY WAY OVER THERE and the middle people insiste on it being in "the middle", then I could probably say that they are really in the wrong, because the truth is in the middle, right? So it's between my position and theirs. So wherever they actually think the truth is is wrong because they think the truth is in the middle, they have no actual position, just a kind of... conceptual truth location system. The truth depends on what people say, not what is. So if I say the truth is WAY WAY WAY WAY WAY WAAAAAAAY over there, maybe I can get the middlesters to see that the truth is really WAY WAY WAY OVER THERE. Because at that point WAY WAY WAY OVER THERE is the same as the middle.

Whatever the truth is, it is always wreathed on gossamer, silken NUANCE, with sparkly highlights dancing playfully across the visage of the Truth, which can never truly be seen.

[Turbineguy]

26. You may have hit upon the crux of the matter.

Republicans know they are not trusted. But if they can get you to distrust everything else, their untrustworthiness is neutralized.