More hypotheses about Snowden's information
Well, so far, my last prediction about where the Snowden leaks might lead hasn't come to pass. But undaunted, I forge ahead with new predictions.
So far, the information that's been released only relates to phone and internet traffic data. That's all very well and good for the NSA, but I am astounded that as yet there has been no talk of credit card information. I cannot imagine that purchases by targeted individuals would not be of interest. In a certain sense, the purchases themselves are metadata (where, when, how much spent, etc.) I also imagine the "content" would be of interest, as well -- what is the target purchasing? Fertilizer? Pressure cookers? One way plane tickets? Contributions to political candidates? And it's not like that information isn't available -- all those marketing analytics spyware thingies and databases are already out there, and the NSA would just have to make some secret deal with those companies (nah!) to access that sort of data. But we haven't heard about it, so far. I have to assume (a) that Glenn Greewald just hasn't released those documents yet or (b) Snowden was only supporting telecom-based systems, and there are different staff who support the credit card data systems used by NSA.
I predict we will eventually hear about the NSA groping masses of credit card data.
2 comments:
I agree. Mostly I'm surprised people are acting surprised about this. NSA isn't building that megadatacenter out in Utah to store recipes. They think they have the wheat-chaff problem solved, but I doubt it. Have you read about the writer whose home was invaded by a security team based on the family's Google searches? The searchers said 99% of their "inspections" (of people like u and me) turn up nothing. Exactly. Chaff.
Well...Annapurna was telling me a story about a first response worker she met who had some background in explosives. His mother was an avid gardener, and at some point purchased a rather large quantity of fertilizer. Apparently somebody came around asking questions :-D.
I was not surprised at the existence of these programs (there have been rumors about them for years) but I'm not surprised people are surprised. The sheer chutzbah of it really is mind-boggling.
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