Before you complain about the NSA looking for patterns in phone calls,

[hedgehog]

tell me you don't care about these things:

- the grocery store tracks your purchases

- the credit card company tracks your purchases

- on-line retailers track your purchases

- who knows what corporations are tracking your Google searches

- Facebook is tracking you

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

1. If it's so harmless why is the government keeping it secret and pursuing the whistleblower?

[burnodo]

26. spot on

the op makes no sense

[still_one]

2. The argument will be it is the government, and the president broke his promise

Last edited Sat Jun 8, 2013, 08:32 PM - Edit history (1)

The fact is it will take more than the president change this

[wandy]

34. Thank you. We have much work to do on this one. nt

[NYC_SKP]

3. Worse than these things, all of the above are probably sharing or selling all of that data, AND...

Your very own computer and smart phone are tools that they use against you.

[still_one]

4. That spam you receive does not just happen magically

[NYC_SKP]

10. No, it sure doesn't. What pops up is based on search history.

and LOL at:

http://betterment.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=439x1312391

[JaneyVee]

7. How do you think Facebook is a billion dollar corporation, they sell nothing of intrinsic value.

Last edited Sat Jun 8, 2013, 04:17 PM - Edit history (1)

They sell your metadata.

[sadbear]

21. I read that "Liking" a Facebook page is worth $25 to the owner of the page.

On average, I guess.

[evlbstrd]

5. Because...

…the 4th Amendment?

[Politicalboi]

6. How dare they collect information

That I freely give.

Can we finally have a "real" investigation of 9/11? It's what pushed this shit through. I think we need to go back and find out who, what, and why.

[Cooley Hurd]

8. I care about each and every one of those things.

-I use ONLY cash

-Use credit cards ONLY when the vendor requires one (ie: rental cars)

-I online-buy ONLY what is not available from a local shop (which is little-to-nothing)

-I use a proxy when I peruse the internet

-what is this "Facebook" thing you speak of?

[Jenoch]

32. I too use mostly cash.

I don't even like to use the debit card from my bank. I don't use Facebook, my cookies are deleted after every time my browser is used, and those grocery store cards are registered with a fake name and address.

[Xipe Totec]

9. I'll worry about facebook when they can send an unmaned drone after me. nt

[TransitJohn]

11. But none of those are the government, who is expressly limited in their actions by the 4th Amendment

eom

[blkmusclmachine]

12. And what about the 30,000 drones to surveil your neighborhood, a.k.a. "PERSISTENT STARE"?

Apples and oranges to some grocery store bullsh!t the Apologists/Cheerleaders want to distract us with.

"11-Dimensional Rope-a-Dupe Bullsh!t Bipartisan Chess"

[Bluenorthwest]

13. The grocery store cannot arrest anyone. They 'track' my purchases by consent, given at each purchase

Facebook of course can not indefinitely detain without trail. My credit card company is optional, don't even need to use one, don't have to use it for everything there is consent involved. Do you understand that consent is a major factor?

[alvis]

14. Are any of those the government?

[TheKentuckian]

15. Choice

I do not have to use any shoppers cards, by doing so I am saying I accept the store knows what I buy and prefer the benefits more than I care about that. I also can make a bogus application and pay cash and the information becomes very difficult to actually tie to me.

I don't have to have or use a credit card or I may use one at times and not use it at others.

I don't have to buy anything online or I can choose to buy some items online but not others.

I don't think any corporation should be able to track my searches.

I don't have to use facebook, if I do elect to I can choose my content.

I do not accept that NSA be randomly snooping through anything in surveillance dragnet and it takes a nearly infinite willful distortion of the fourth amendment to even pretend the government is no specifically restricted from such behavior no matter how many bogus legal briefs are churned out, no matter how many illegal twistings Congress passes, or how many corrupt court decisions come down.

[leveymg]

16. NSA includes all those record sources in its database to assemble your profile.

You should read Jane Mayer's biography of the NSA whistleblower, Bill Binney, who designed The Program that Bush unleashed without warrants. This is how he describes it: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/05/23/110523fa_fact_mayer?currentPage=all

Binney expressed terrible remorse over the way some of his algorithms were used after 9/11. ThinThread, the “little program” that he invented to track enemies outside the U.S., “got twisted,” and was used for both foreign and domestic spying: “I should apologize to the American people. It’s violated everyone’s rights. It can be used to eavesdrop on the whole world.” According to Binney, Drake took his side against the N.S.A.’s management and, as a result, became a political target within the agency.

Binney spent most of his career at the agency. In 1997, he became the technical director of the World Geopolitical and Military Analysis Reporting Group, a division of six thousand employees which focusses on analyzing signals intelligence. By the late nineties, the N.S.A. had become overwhelmed by the amount of digital data it was collecting. Binney and his team began developing codes aimed at streamlining the process, allowing the agency to isolate useful intelligence. This was the beginning of ThinThread.

In the late nineties, Binney estimated that there were some two and a half billion phones in the world and one and a half billion I.P. addresses. Approximately twenty terabytes of unique information passed around the world every minute. Binney started assembling a system that could trap and map all of it. “I wanted to graph the world,” Binney said. “People said, ‘You can’t do this—the possibilities are infinite.’ ” But he argued that “at any given point in time the number of atoms in the universe is big, but it’s finite.”

As Binney imagined it, ThinThread would correlate data from financial transactions, travel records, Web searches, G.P.S. equipment, and any other “attributes” that an analyst might find useful in pinpointing “the bad guys.” By 2000, Binney, using fibre optics, had set up a computer network that could chart relationships among people in real time. It also turned the N.S.A.’s data-collection paradigm upside down. Instead of vacuuming up information around the world and then sending it all back to headquarters for analysis, ThinThread processed information as it was collected—discarding useless information on the spot and avoiding the overload problem that plagued centralized systems. Binney says, “The beauty of it is that it was open-ended, so it could keep expanding.”

Pilot tests of ThinThread proved almost too successful, according to a former intelligence expert who analyzed it. “It was nearly perfect,” the official says. “But it processed such a large amount of data that it picked up more Americans than the other systems.” Though ThinThread was intended to intercept foreign communications, it continued documenting signals when a trail crossed into the U.S. . . .

[Bluenorthwest]

17. hedgehog driveby...

maybe it was really a woodchuck, just chuck'n wood.

[Cooley Hurd]

18. Don't go there...

hedgehog is a long-standing, GOOD DUer. Perhaps wrong in this OP, but still an admirable DUer.

[hedgehog]

20. Not a drive-by as such - I had to go to work and I really didn't

have any more to say

[Cooley Hurd]

22. I know you're not the drive-by type.

Was up your way w/ my SO on Memorial Day (went to the Fort and then to Rudi's for fish and Texas Hots).

[hedgehog]

29. Rudi's!

[Cooley Hurd]

30. .

[premium]

19. And none of these are govt. agencies. nt.

[DisgustipatedinCA]

23. Those entities all have our consent

The federal government does not. That's a thread-killing difference.

[Spider Jerusalem]

24. .....

This is such a witless comparison I'm not sure it's worth the effort required to point out how fucking stupid it is. But here goes anyway: when I shop in a grocery, or on Amazon, using a debit card or credit card? I expect my purchases to be tracked. I am aware it's going to happen; I know that the grocery will give me coupons based on my shopping habits, that Amazon will suggest products bought by people with my purchase history, that my bank will notice unusual spending patterns and potentially disable the card if something is an anomaly. None of these things is like an intelligence agency tracking the patterns of my telephone calls, where I am, to whom I speak, and for how long. In one instance, it's information that the retailer or bank is getting as part of a transaction. There is no such transaction involving the NSA, or any expectation of one. And that's why this is a stupid comparison.

[Marrah_G]

25. You consent to those

and frankly not one of them has the ability to take away my freedom or ruin my life.

[Corruption Inc]

28. Is the grocery store or facebook armed w/arrest powers?

Just a question before you continue with the false analogies.

[WinkyDink]

31. Not on FB, and I KNOW WHEN I HAND OVER A CARD. And NONE of your examples = a "private"

conversation.

[jberryhill]

33. OFA bought a lot of this data to direct its campaign messages

And it was to the delight of many DUers that OFA had employed sophisticated analytics to determine correlations between consumer preferences, behavior, and response to campaign messages.

[Union Scribe]

35. Which of those has the power to imprison/kill you based on what they find?

Yeah I know, if you've got nothing to hide...

[wandy]

36. Now that we are all starting to understand how much data we are generating.......

Now that we see how many people profit from that data.

Why did we wake up only after a conservative news source had a long overdue story just at the start of the scandal season?