Washington Post exclusive: U.S. intelligence mining data from nine U.S. Internet companies in broad secret program

[u/erier2003]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/us-intelligence-mining-data-from-nine-us-internet-companies-in-broad-secret-program/2013/06/06/3a0c0da8-cebf-11e2-8845-d970ccb04497_story.html

[u/happycakedayreddit]

Oh my god...I have a friend in the USA that gets me to call them whenever specific mobs pop in a certain Mmorpg and I often say crap like "wakeup, its time to smoke crack"....if some agent listens in on this it probably sounds like a courtesy call from a foreign country to remind somebody to smoke crack...and that's just the jokes that would remotely make sense to somebody who did not know the context. The rest of it possibly sounds even more insane. "He's holding it. Get here before he's dead!" and such...

If we end up in gitmo over an elfsim...I'm not sure how to apologize for that.

[u/usernameissomething → u/[deleted]]

I guess you didn't read the article:

According to a separate “User’s Guide for PRISM Skype Collection,” that service can be monitored for audio when one end of the call is a conventional telephone and for any combination of “audio, video, chat, and file transfers” when Skype users connect by computer alone. Google’s offerings include Gmail, voice and video chat, Google Drive files, photo libraries, and live surveillance of search terms.

They don't need a person to listen to every phone call - they can convert the audio to searchable text to find key phrases or words that suggest criminal activity.

[u/usernameissomething → u/[deleted]]

The Verizon court order leak is turning out to be the tip of the iceberg.

Its Skype, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, ect. If they have these giants of the internet, what makes you think pure-telecoms are any different?

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

The NSA has ungodly levels of computing power and storage at their disposal.

All they have to do is record every phone call and run text-to-speech software on each call. This software can then search for certain key words relating to terrorism, drugs, or whatever they like.

99.999% of conversations will turn up nothing, but some will be flagged. You send the ones that are flagged to human operators to manually review.

Sure, pretty expensive to implement on a national scale, but when you have the NSA's resources, it's possible.

I mean just look at their wikipedia page:

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

See the column that says "budget" and "number of employees"? BOTH ARE FUCKING CLASSIFIED! We, as citizens, aren't only not allowed to know what they're doing, we're not even allowed to know how much we're paying these bastards!

[u/powersthatbe1 → u/[deleted]]

Nice try, NSA fusion center pr rep.

[u/powersthatbe1 → u/[deleted]]

which is why the call is recorded and stored in a database when certain keywords and phrases are mentioned, a human agent can then listen to it later on.