Total Information Awareness Project

usasportstraining Notable Member

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It doesn't come as much of a surprise that it's been resurrected, but it is amazing just how much data they can gather.

Report: NSA's Warrantless Spying Resurrects Banned 'Total Information Awareness' Project

Total Information Awareness -- the all-seeing terrorist spotting algorithm-meets-the-mother-of-all-databases that was ostensibly de-funded by Congress in 2003, never actually died, and was largely rebuilt in secret by the NSA, according to the Wall Street Journal's Siobhan Gorman.

In a fantastic story Monday, Gorman pulls together threads and lays out what many have suspected and alleged in lawsuits -- the NSA is collecting and sifting through immense amounts of data about who Americans talk to, what they are interested in, how they spend their money and where they travel in order to find secret terrorism cells inside America.

The NSA is engaged in a widespread mining of so-called transactional data -- domestic telephone records, credit card purchases, travel data, international financial data, internet searches, subject lines and headers of emails -- pulling in immense data about Americans and foreigners, which it then uses to find particular targets -- or even, according to Gorman -- to decide what cities to target for blanket surveillance.

Two former officials familiar with the data-sifting efforts said they work by starting with some sort of lead, like a phone number or Internet address. In partnership with the FBI, the systems then can track all domestic and foreign transactions of people associated with that item -- and then the people who associated with them, and so on, casting a gradually wider net. An intelligence official described more of a rapid-response effect: If a person suspected of terrorist connections is believed to be in a U.S. city -- for instance, Detroit, a community with a high concentration of Muslim Americans -- the government's spy systems may be directed to collect and analyze all electronic communications into and out of the city.

The haul can include records of phone calls, email headers and destinations, data on financial transactions and records of Internet browsing. The system also would collect information about other people, including those in the U.S., who communicated with people in Detroit.

The information doesn't generally include the contents of conversations or emails. But it can give such transactional information as a cellphone's location, whom a person is calling, and what Web sites he or she is visiting. For an email, the data haul can include the identities of the sender and recipient and the subject line, but not the content of the message.
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usasportstraining, Mar 12, 2008 IP

lightless Notable Member

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Marketing and Telemarketing companies would LOVE to get their hands on that info.

lightless, Mar 12, 2008 IP

usasportstraining Notable Member

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lightless said: ↑

Marketing and Telemarketing companies would LOVE to get their hands on that info.
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Yeah! All it will take is some evil NSA agent to start selling to the highest bidder.

A marketer that knows everything about you. Scary!

usasportstraining, Mar 12, 2008 IP

soniqhost.com Notable Member

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lightless said: ↑

Marketing and Telemarketing companies would LOVE to get their hands on that info.
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They already have that information, the way people use credit cards to purchase everything, how do you know that credit card companies aren't selling your personal info

soniqhost.com, Mar 12, 2008 IP

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