>Any kind of Internet traffic that passes before these mass surveillance sensors can be analyzed in a protocol-agnostic manner, meta-data and content both, and it can be today, right now, searched not only with very little effort, via a complex regular expression — which is a type of shorthand programming — but also via any algorithm an analyst can implement in popular high level programming
That's amazing. Imagine being able to construct a regular expression that get's applied on every single piece of communication in the world. Yes, it's far too much power to entrust to anyone, much less an unaccountable secretive organization, but I'll be damned if that's not an incredibly fascinating and attractive proposition. No wonder these bureaucrats are willing to so thoroughly overstep the law, that kind of power must be very tempting.
This is a foolish belief. The higher ups in NSA are most likely under the very same surveillance that they oversee, whether they know it or not. After all, the NSA cannot be immune to internal politics and power-plays.
Usually there's a "code of silence" between crooks such as these. They know that if they started digging for another, they'd have others dig for their shit.
Plus, it's not like anyone will use their information to make their life hell or put them in jail. At worst, they might be denied some promotion.
Every comment, every upvote, every webpage you've ever viewed - parsed and mined for context specific metadata by some watson-like super-brain. And the interface isn't a regex, it's more minority-report style and lets you query people by political/economic/religious/etc affiliation. And you better believe there's a terminate button that disables your car brakes courtesy of on-star. (I keed I keed)
"In the case of Michael Hastings, what evidence is available publicly is consistent with a car cyber attack. And the problem with that is you can't prove it."
- Richard Clark, former Counter-Terrorism Czar
While evidence is insufficient to draw conclusions in that specific case, the fact that it is so plausible should be extremely worrying. (Hi, NSA spiders.)
That's amazing. Imagine being able to construct a regular expression that get's applied on every single piece of communication in the world. Yes, it's far too much power to entrust to anyone, much less an unaccountable secretive organization, but I'll be damned if that's not an incredibly fascinating and attractive proposition. No wonder these bureaucrats are willing to so thoroughly overstep the law, that kind of power must be very tempting.