All the while claiming they are NOT doing that!
"NSA tracks data of Americans’ social connections" by James Risen and Laura Poitras | New York Times, September 28, 2013
WASHINGTON — Since 2010, the National Security Agency has been exploiting its huge collections of data to create sophisticated graphs of some Americans’ social connections that can identify their associates, their locations at certain times, their traveling companions and other personal information, according to newly disclosed documents and interviews with officials.
The spy agency began allowing the analysis of phone call and email logs in November 2010 to examine Americans’ networks of associations for foreign intelligence purposes after NSA officials lifted previous restrictions on the practice, according to documents provided by Edward J. Snowden, the former NSA contractor.
The policy shift was intended to help the agency “discover and track” connections between intelligence targets overseas and people in the United States, according to an NSA memorandum from January 2011. The agency was authorized to conduct “large-scale graph analysis on very large sets of communications metadata without having to check foreignness” of every email address, phone number or other identifier, the document said. Because of concerns about infringing on the privacy of U.S. citizens, the computer analysis of such data had previously been permitted only for foreigners.
The agency can augment the communications data with material from public, commercial and other sources, including bank codes, insurance information, Facebook profiles, passenger manifests, voter registration rolls and GPS location information, as well as property records and unspecified tax data, according to the documents. They do not indicate any restrictions on the use of such “enrichment” data, and several former senior Obama administration officials said the agency drew on it for both Americans and foreigners.
NSA officials declined to say how many Americans have been caught up in the effort, including people involved in no wrongdoing. The documents do not describe what has resulted from the scrutiny, which links phone numbers and emails in a “contact chain” tied directly or indirectly to a person or organization overseas that is of foreign intelligence interest.
The new disclosures add to the growing body of knowledge in recent months about the NSA’s access to and use of private information concerning Americans, prompting lawmakers in Washington to call for reining in the agency and President Barack Obama to order an examination of its surveillance policies. Almost everything about the agency’s operations is hidden, and the decision to revise the limits concerning Americans was made in secret, without review by the nation’s intelligence court or any public debate. As far back as 2006, a Justice Department memo warned of the potential for the “misuse” of such information without adequate safeguards.
An agency spokeswoman, asked about the analyses of Americans’ data, said, “All data queries must include a foreign intelligence justification, period.”
“All of NSA’s work has a foreign intelligence purpose,” the spokeswoman added. “Our activities are centered on counterterrorism, counterproliferation and cybersecurity.”
And don't you dare question this government or its motivations!
The legal underpinning of the policy change, she said, was a 1979 Supreme Court ruling that Americans could have no expectation of privacy about what numbers they had called. Based on that ruling, the Justice Department and the Pentagon decided that it was permissible to create contact chains using Americans’ “metadata,” which includes the timing, location and other details of calls and emails, but not their content. The agency is not required to seek warrants for the analyses from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
That's a LIE!
The new documents provide a rare window into what the NSA actually does with the information it gathers. A series of agency PowerPoint presentations and memos describe how the NSA has been able to develop software and other tools — one document cited a new generation of programs that “revolutionize” data collection and analysis — to unlock as many secrets about individuals as possible.
Where my SGS print copy ended it.
NSA officials declined to identify which phone and email databases are used to create the social network diagrams, and the documents provided by Snowden do not specify them.
Then he really is a psyop. Interesting how he popped up just after Wikileaks was outed for being an intelligence agency snare and trap.
The agency did say that the large database of Americans’ domestic phone call records, which was revealed by Snowden in June and caused bipartisan alarm in Washington, was excluded. (NSA officials have previously acknowledged that the agency has done limited analysis in that database, collected under provisions of the Patriot Act, exclusively for people who might be linked to terrorism suspects.)
But the agency has multiple collection programs and databases, the former officials said, adding that the social networking analyses relied on both domestic and international metadata. They spoke only on the condition of anonymity because the information was classified.
The concerns in the United States since Snowden’s revelations have largely focused on the scope of the agency’s collection of the private data of Americans and the potential for abuse.
The spy agency, led by Gen. Keith B. Alexander, an unabashed advocate for more weapons in the hunt for information about the nation’s adversaries, clearly views its collections of metadata as one of its most powerful resources. NSA analysts can exploit that information to develop a portrait of an individual, one that is perhaps more complete and predictive of behavior than could be obtained by listening to phone conversations or reading emails, experts say.
We are entering the realm of Minority Report, folks.
Phone and email logs, for example, allow analysts to identify people’s friends and associates, detect where they were at a certain time, acquire clues to religious or political affiliations, and pick up sensitive information like regular calls to a psychiatrist’s office, late-night messages to an extramarital partner or exchanges with a fellow plotter.
“Metadata can be very revealing,” said Orin S. Kerr, a law professor at George Washington University. “Knowing things like the number someone just dialed or the location of the person’s cellphone is going to allow to assemble a picture of what someone is up to. It’s the digital equivalent of tailing a suspect.”
All Americans are suspects, huh?
The NSA had been pushing for more than a decade to obtain the rule change allowing the analysis of Americans’ phone and email data. Intelligence officials had been frustrated that they had to stop when a contact chain hit a telephone number or email address believed to be used by an American, even though it might yield valuable intelligence primarily concerning a foreigner who was overseas, according to documents previously disclosed by Snowden.
Yeah, that pesky law and constitution getting in the way.
NSA officials also wanted to employ the agency’s advanced computer analysis tools to sift through its huge databases with much greater efficiency.
The agency had asked for the new power as early as 1999, the documents show, but had been initially rebuffed because it was not permitted under rules of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that were intended to protect the privacy of Americans.
A 2009 draft of an NSA inspector general’s report suggests that contact chaining and analysis may have been done on Americans’ communications data under the George W. Bush administration’s program of wiretapping without warrants, which began after the Sept. 11 attacks to detect terrorist activities and skirted the existing laws governing electronic surveillance.
In 2006, months after the wiretapping program was disclosed by The New York Times, the NSA’s acting general counsel wrote a letter to a senior Justice Department official, which was also leaked by Snowden, formally asking for permission to perform the analysis on U.S. phone and email data. A Justice Department memo to the attorney general noted that the “misuse” of such information “could raise serious concerns,” and said the NSA promised to impose safeguards, including regular audits, on the metadata program. In 2008, the Bush administration gave its approval.
A new policy that year, detailed in “Defense Supplemental Procedures Governing Communications Metadata Analysis,” authorized by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey, said that because the Supreme Court had ruled that metadata was not constitutionally protected, NSA analysts could use such information “without regard to the nationality or location of the communicants,” according to an internal NSA description of the policy.
After that decision, which was previously reported by The Guardian, the NSA performed the social network graphing in a pilot project for 1 1/2 years “to great benefit,” according to the 2011 memo. It was put in place in November 2010 in “Sigint Management Directive 424” (sigint refers to signals intelligence).
In the 2011 memo explaining the shift, NSA analysts were told they could trace the contacts of Americans as long as they cited a foreign intelligence justification. That could include anything from ties to terrorism, weapons proliferation, international drug smuggling or espionage to conversations with a foreign diplomat or a political figure.
Analysts were warned to follow existing “minimization rules,” which prohibit the NSA from sharing with other agencies names and other details of Americans whose communications are collected, unless they are necessary to understand foreign intelligence reports or there is evidence of a crime.
That's a lie, and not if it is Israel.
The agency is required to obtain a warrant from the intelligence court to target a “U.S. person” — a citizen or legal resident — for actual eavesdropping.
The NSA documents show that one of the main tools used for chaining phone numbers and email addresses has the code name Mainway. It is a repository into which vast amounts of data flow daily from the agency’s fiber-optic cables, corporate partners and foreign computer networks that have been hacked.
The documents show that significant amounts of information from the United States go into Mainway. An internal NSA bulletin, for example, noted that in 2011 Mainway was taking in 700 million phone records per day. In August 2011, it began receiving an additional 1.1 billion cellphone records daily from an unnamed American service provider under Section 702 of the 2008 FISA Amendments Act, which allows for the collection of the data of Americans if at least one end of the communication is believed to be foreign.
The overall volume of metadata collected by the NSA is reflected in the agency’s secret 2013 budget request to Congress. The budget document, disclosed by Snowden, shows that the agency is pouring money and manpower into creating a metadata repository capable of taking in 20 billion “record events” daily and making them available to NSA analysts within 60 minutes.
The spending includes support for the “Enterprise Knowledge System,” which has a $394 million multiyear budget and is designed to “rapidly discover and correlate complex relationships and patterns across diverse data sources on a massive scale,” according to a 2008 document. The data is automatically computed to speed queries and discover new targets for surveillance.
A top-secret document titled “Better Person Centric Analysis” describes how the agency looks for 94 “entity types,” including phone numbers, email addresses and IP addresses. In addition, the NSA correlates 164 “relationship types” to build social networks and what the agency calls “community of interest” profiles, using queries like “travelsWith, hasFather, sentForumMessage, employs.”
A 2009 PowerPoint presentation provided more examples of data sources available in the “enrichment” process, including location-based services like GPS and TomTom, online social networks, billing records and bank codes for transactions in the United States and overseas.
At a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing Thursday, Alexander was asked if the agency ever collected or planned to collect bulk records about Americans’ locations based on cellphone tower data. He replied that it was not doing so as part of the call log program authorized by the Patriot Act, but said a fuller response would be classified.
If the NSA does not immediately use the phone and email logging data of an American, it can be stored for later use, at least under certain circumstances, according to several documents.
One 2011 memo, for example, said that after a court ruling narrowed the scope of the agency’s collection, the data in question was “being buffered for possible ingest” later. A year earlier, an internal briefing paper from the NSA Office of Legal Counsel showed that the agency was allowed to collect and store raw traffic, which includes both metadata and content, about “U.S. persons” for up to five years online and for an additional 10 years offline for “historical searches.”
So the government did record your phone calls, even though they told us they did not!??!!
--more--"
This is Your Life, Americans!
"No detail was too small for all-consuming NSA; Documents show global reach of agency’s spying" by Scott Shane | New York Times, November 03, 2013
NEW YORK — When Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general, sat down with President Obama at the White House in April to discuss Syrian chemical weapons, Israeli-Palestinian peace talks and climate change, it was a cordial, routine exchange.
The National Security Agency nonetheless went to work in advance and intercepted Ban’s talking points for the meeting, a feat the agency later reported as an “operational highlight” in a weekly internal brag sheet. It is hard to imagine what edge this could have given Obama in a friendly chat, if he even saw the NSA’s modest scoop. (The White House won’t say.)
But it was emblematic of an agency that for decades has operated on the principle that any eavesdropping that can be done on a foreign target of any conceivable interest — now or in the future — should be done. After all, American intelligence officials reasoned, who’s going to find out?
From thousands of classified documents, the National Security Agency emerges as an electronic omnivore of staggering capabilities, eavesdropping and hacking its way around the world to strip governments and other targets of their secrets, all the while enforcing the utmost secrecy about its own operations.
It spies routinely on friends as well as foes, as has become obvious recently. The agency’s official mission list includes using its surveillance powers to achieve “diplomatic advantage” over such allies as France and Germany and “economic advantage” over Japan and Brazil, among other countries.
Obama found himself in September standing uncomfortably beside the president of Brazil, Dilma Rousseff, who was furious at being named as a target of NSA eavesdropping.
We don't care about the fraudulent and faux anger from other stink elites; we care about the monitoring of EVERYONE ELSE!
Since then, there has been a parade of such protests, from the European Union, Mexico, France, Germany, and Spain. Chagrined US officials joke that soon there will be complaints from foreign leaders feeling slighted because the agency had not targeted them.
James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, has repeatedly dismissed such objections as brazen hypocrisy from countries that do their own share of spying. But in a recent interview, he acknowledged that the scale of eavesdropping by the NSA, with 35,000 workers and $10.8 billion a year, sets it apart.
“There’s no question that from a capability standpoint we probably dwarf everybody on the planet, just about, with perhaps the exception of Russia and China,” he said.
Since Edward J. Snowden began releasing the agency’s documents in June, the unrelenting stream of disclosures has opened the most extended debate on the agency’s mission since its creation in 1952.
The scrutiny has ignited a crisis of purpose and legitimacy for the NSA, the nation’s largest intelligence agency, and the White House has ordered a review of both its domestic and foreign intelligence collection.
While much of the focus has been on whether the agency violates Americans’ privacy, an issue under examination by Congress and two review panels, the anger expressed around the world about American surveillance has prompted far broader questions.
If secrecy can no longer be taken for granted, when does the political risk of eavesdropping overseas outweigh its intelligence benefits? Should foreign citizens, many of whom now rely on American companies for e-mail and Internet services, have any privacy protections from the NSA?
A review of classified agency documents, obtained by Snowden and shared with The New York Times by The Guardian, offered a rich sampling of the agency’s global operations.
Related: The Snowden Interview
I don't like psyops, sorry.
The NSA seems to be listening everywhere in the world, gathering minute data that might add to the US government’s knowledge of the world. To some Americans, that may be a comfort. To others, and to people overseas, that may suggest an agency out of control.
--more--"
"NSA collecting millions of faces from web images" by James Risen and Laura Poitras | New York Times June 01, 2014
The National Security Agency is harvesting huge numbers of images of people from communications it intercepts through its global surveillance operations for use in sophisticated facial recognition programs, according to top-secret documents.
The spy agency’s reliance on facial recognition technology has grown significantly over the last four years as the agency has turned to new software to exploit the flood of images included in e-mails, text messages, social media, videoconferences, and other communications, the NSA documents reveal.
But they can't find the hackers, can't find the perverts, can't prevent nut-job violence, can't prevent financial fleecing.
You know, after a while it becomes clear that THEY MUST BE BEHIND those $ELF-$ERVING and $ELF-JU$TIFYING $HIT, huh?
Agency officials believe that technological advances could revolutionize the way that the NSA finds intelligence targets around the world, according to the documents. The agency’s ambitions for this highly sensitive ability and the scale of its effort have not previously been disclosed.
The agency intercepts “millions of images per day” — including about 55,000 “facial recognition quality images” — which translate into “tremendous untapped potential,” according to 2011 documents obtained from the former agency contractor Edward J. Snowden.
Documents he no longer has; he turned them all over to the Zionist mole Greenwald. And yet the propaganda pre$$ is still putting Snowden's face on it. That, and certain people's certain people's unquestioned faith in the guy really has me suspicious.
While once focused on written and oral communications, the NSA now considers facial images, fingerprints, and other identifiers just as important to its mission of tracking suspected terrorists and other intelligence targets, the documents show.
If it is to track terrorists why do they need everything on all of us, and why are they building huge repositories for all the information at the same time?
“It’s not just the traditional communications we’re after: It’s taking a full-arsenal approach that digitally exploits the clues a target leaves behind in their regular activities on the net to compile biographic and biometric information” that can help “implement precision targeting,” noted a 2010 document.
So what idiot terrorist is going to leave all that behind other than some FBI-framed patsy?
One NSA PowerPoint presentation from 2011, for example, displays several photographs of an unidentified man — sometimes bearded, other times clean-shaven — in different settings, along with more than two dozen data points about him. These include whether he was on the Transportation Security Administration no-fly list, his passport and visa status, known associates or suspected terrorist ties, and comments made about him by informants to US intelligence agencies.
It is not clear how many people around the world, and how many Americans, might have been caught up in the effort. Neither federal privacy laws nor the nation’s surveillance laws provide specific protections for facial images. Given the NSA’s foreign intelligence mission, much of the imagery would involve people overseas whose data was scooped up through cable taps, Internet hubs, and satellite transmissions.
I'm tired of the NYT, it's lies, and its excuse making for tyrannical authority.
Because the agency considers images a form of communications content, the NSA would be required to get court approval for imagery of Americans collected through its surveillance programs, just as it must to read their e-mails or eavesdrop on their phone conversations, according to an NSA spokeswoman. Cross-border communications in which an American might be e-mailing or texting an image to someone targeted by the agency overseas could be excepted.
As if we still believe this criminal and unconstitutional government would abide by the law. Did they? We don't know; it's classified and we can't see it.
No secret that AmeriKa's ma$$ media and propaganda pre$$ is $hit now.
Civil-liberties advocates and other critics are concerned that the power of the improving technology, used by government and industry, could erode privacy. “Facial recognition can be very invasive,” said Alessandro Acquisti, a researcher on facial recognition technology at Carnegie Mellon University. “There are still technical limitations on it, but the computational power keeps growing, and the databases keep growing, and the algorithms keep improving.”
How do you erode something that is already gone?
The State Department has what several outside experts say could be the largest facial imagery database in the federal government, storing hundreds of millions of photographs of American passport holders and foreign visa applicants. And the Department of Homeland Security is funding pilot projects at police departments around the country to match suspects against faces in a crowd.
All based on damnable lies.
The NSA, though, is unique in its ability to match images with huge troves of private communications.
“We would not be doing our job if we didn’t seek ways to continuously improve the precision of signals intelligence activities — aiming to counteract the efforts of valid foreign intelligence targets to disguise themselves or conceal plans to harm the United States and its allies,” said Vanee M. Vines, the agency spokeswoman.
I hope you are watching the Israeli spy rings then.
She added that the NSA did not have access to photographs in state databases of driver’s licenses or to passport photos of Americans, while declining to say whether the agency had access to the State Department database of photos of foreign visa applicants. She also declined to say whether the NSA collected facial imagery of Americans from Facebook and other social media through means other than communications intercepts.
Why would they have to? The Facebookers just handed it to them.
--more--"
As long as it helps out the FBI, right?
And now the Internet is becoming a problem, huh?
This is Your Life, Americans!
"No detail was too small for all-consuming NSA; Documents show global reach of agency’s spying" by Scott Shane | New York Times, November 03, 2013
NEW YORK — When Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general, sat down with President Obama at the White House in April to discuss Syrian chemical weapons, Israeli-Palestinian peace talks and climate change, it was a cordial, routine exchange.
The National Security Agency nonetheless went to work in advance and intercepted Ban’s talking points for the meeting, a feat the agency later reported as an “operational highlight” in a weekly internal brag sheet. It is hard to imagine what edge this could have given Obama in a friendly chat, if he even saw the NSA’s modest scoop. (The White House won’t say.)
But it was emblematic of an agency that for decades has operated on the principle that any eavesdropping that can be done on a foreign target of any conceivable interest — now or in the future — should be done. After all, American intelligence officials reasoned, who’s going to find out?
From thousands of classified documents, the National Security Agency emerges as an electronic omnivore of staggering capabilities, eavesdropping and hacking its way around the world to strip governments and other targets of their secrets, all the while enforcing the utmost secrecy about its own operations.
It spies routinely on friends as well as foes, as has become obvious recently. The agency’s official mission list includes using its surveillance powers to achieve “diplomatic advantage” over such allies as France and Germany and “economic advantage” over Japan and Brazil, among other countries.
Obama found himself in September standing uncomfortably beside the president of Brazil, Dilma Rousseff, who was furious at being named as a target of NSA eavesdropping.
We don't care about the fraudulent and faux anger from other stink elites; we care about the monitoring of EVERYONE ELSE!
Since then, there has been a parade of such protests, from the European Union, Mexico, France, Germany, and Spain. Chagrined US officials joke that soon there will be complaints from foreign leaders feeling slighted because the agency had not targeted them.
James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, has repeatedly dismissed such objections as brazen hypocrisy from countries that do their own share of spying. But in a recent interview, he acknowledged that the scale of eavesdropping by the NSA, with 35,000 workers and $10.8 billion a year, sets it apart.
“There’s no question that from a capability standpoint we probably dwarf everybody on the planet, just about, with perhaps the exception of Russia and China,” he said.
Since Edward J. Snowden began releasing the agency’s documents in June, the unrelenting stream of disclosures has opened the most extended debate on the agency’s mission since its creation in 1952.
The scrutiny has ignited a crisis of purpose and legitimacy for the NSA, the nation’s largest intelligence agency, and the White House has ordered a review of both its domestic and foreign intelligence collection.
While much of the focus has been on whether the agency violates Americans’ privacy, an issue under examination by Congress and two review panels, the anger expressed around the world about American surveillance has prompted far broader questions.
If secrecy can no longer be taken for granted, when does the political risk of eavesdropping overseas outweigh its intelligence benefits? Should foreign citizens, many of whom now rely on American companies for e-mail and Internet services, have any privacy protections from the NSA?
A review of classified agency documents, obtained by Snowden and shared with The New York Times by The Guardian, offered a rich sampling of the agency’s global operations.
Related: The Snowden Interview
I don't like psyops, sorry.
The NSA seems to be listening everywhere in the world, gathering minute data that might add to the US government’s knowledge of the world. To some Americans, that may be a comfort. To others, and to people overseas, that may suggest an agency out of control.
--more--"
"NSA collecting millions of faces from web images" by James Risen and Laura Poitras | New York Times June 01, 2014
The National Security Agency is harvesting huge numbers of images of people from communications it intercepts through its global surveillance operations for use in sophisticated facial recognition programs, according to top-secret documents.
The spy agency’s reliance on facial recognition technology has grown significantly over the last four years as the agency has turned to new software to exploit the flood of images included in e-mails, text messages, social media, videoconferences, and other communications, the NSA documents reveal.
But they can't find the hackers, can't find the perverts, can't prevent nut-job violence, can't prevent financial fleecing.
You know, after a while it becomes clear that THEY MUST BE BEHIND those $ELF-$ERVING and $ELF-JU$TIFYING $HIT, huh?
Agency officials believe that technological advances could revolutionize the way that the NSA finds intelligence targets around the world, according to the documents. The agency’s ambitions for this highly sensitive ability and the scale of its effort have not previously been disclosed.
The agency intercepts “millions of images per day” — including about 55,000 “facial recognition quality images” — which translate into “tremendous untapped potential,” according to 2011 documents obtained from the former agency contractor Edward J. Snowden.
Documents he no longer has; he turned them all over to the Zionist mole Greenwald. And yet the propaganda pre$$ is still putting Snowden's face on it. That, and certain people's certain people's unquestioned faith in the guy really has me suspicious.
While once focused on written and oral communications, the NSA now considers facial images, fingerprints, and other identifiers just as important to its mission of tracking suspected terrorists and other intelligence targets, the documents show.
If it is to track terrorists why do they need everything on all of us, and why are they building huge repositories for all the information at the same time?
“It’s not just the traditional communications we’re after: It’s taking a full-arsenal approach that digitally exploits the clues a target leaves behind in their regular activities on the net to compile biographic and biometric information” that can help “implement precision targeting,” noted a 2010 document.
So what idiot terrorist is going to leave all that behind other than some FBI-framed patsy?
One NSA PowerPoint presentation from 2011, for example, displays several photographs of an unidentified man — sometimes bearded, other times clean-shaven — in different settings, along with more than two dozen data points about him. These include whether he was on the Transportation Security Administration no-fly list, his passport and visa status, known associates or suspected terrorist ties, and comments made about him by informants to US intelligence agencies.
It is not clear how many people around the world, and how many Americans, might have been caught up in the effort. Neither federal privacy laws nor the nation’s surveillance laws provide specific protections for facial images. Given the NSA’s foreign intelligence mission, much of the imagery would involve people overseas whose data was scooped up through cable taps, Internet hubs, and satellite transmissions.
I'm tired of the NYT, it's lies, and its excuse making for tyrannical authority.
Because the agency considers images a form of communications content, the NSA would be required to get court approval for imagery of Americans collected through its surveillance programs, just as it must to read their e-mails or eavesdrop on their phone conversations, according to an NSA spokeswoman. Cross-border communications in which an American might be e-mailing or texting an image to someone targeted by the agency overseas could be excepted.
As if we still believe this criminal and unconstitutional government would abide by the law. Did they? We don't know; it's classified and we can't see it.
No secret that AmeriKa's ma$$ media and propaganda pre$$ is $hit now.
Civil-liberties advocates and other critics are concerned that the power of the improving technology, used by government and industry, could erode privacy. “Facial recognition can be very invasive,” said Alessandro Acquisti, a researcher on facial recognition technology at Carnegie Mellon University. “There are still technical limitations on it, but the computational power keeps growing, and the databases keep growing, and the algorithms keep improving.”
How do you erode something that is already gone?
The State Department has what several outside experts say could be the largest facial imagery database in the federal government, storing hundreds of millions of photographs of American passport holders and foreign visa applicants. And the Department of Homeland Security is funding pilot projects at police departments around the country to match suspects against faces in a crowd.
All based on damnable lies.
The NSA, though, is unique in its ability to match images with huge troves of private communications.
“We would not be doing our job if we didn’t seek ways to continuously improve the precision of signals intelligence activities — aiming to counteract the efforts of valid foreign intelligence targets to disguise themselves or conceal plans to harm the United States and its allies,” said Vanee M. Vines, the agency spokeswoman.
I hope you are watching the Israeli spy rings then.
She added that the NSA did not have access to photographs in state databases of driver’s licenses or to passport photos of Americans, while declining to say whether the agency had access to the State Department database of photos of foreign visa applicants. She also declined to say whether the NSA collected facial imagery of Americans from Facebook and other social media through means other than communications intercepts.
Why would they have to? The Facebookers just handed it to them.
--more--"
As long as it helps out the FBI, right?
And now the Internet is becoming a problem, huh?
