NSA Spying and Target - What It Means
Most people don't know that the USA has only a handful of exchange points where network data flows into and out of the country. That's why it is not such a difficult task for NSA to tap them all. Of course the data flow is massive, but so is the expense budget allocated for spying.
Estimates range from 70,000,000 customers to more than 100,000,000 who had their account information stolen from Target over holiday shopping period.
If you take at face value NSA's assertion that it only monitors communications entering and leaving the US, they surely should have noticed a massive uptick in packets heading to Russia and Eastern Europe.
In fact, over the period of a couple of months, there would have been a rather obvious spike in messages to Romania, Russia and a handful of other destinations, that spike could have been as high as an extra 500,000 to a 1,000,000 a day.
So I am going to ask a few obvious questions-
1. Why didn't our $100 billion dollar spy agency, allegedly only spying on foreign traffic (*), notice anything unusual about 10s of millions of messages heading to Romania and elsewhere?
2. If they did detect it, what could possibly be gained by keeping it a secret. Is NSA going to cover the estimated $400,000,000 losses?
Anyone with basic knowledge of the technology at work understands there can be no apologies or excuses for this breach given our massive spying infrastructure. It is inconceivable that NSA or CIA or FBI didn't notice anything unusual.
In fact, there is every reason to believe that our infrastructure could be made much more secure, however the same measures that would secure our privacy would also make it more difficult for NSA, CIA and FBI to spy on us. Our government has chosen to not invest securing our networks and instead is spending the money buying people and equipment to to spy on us.
There must be accountability for these programs given our billions of investment. However, once again another secret too big to fail institution gets amnesty for incompetence at best, and amnesty for deliberate and willful negligence at worst.
Such a profound breakdown of principals has come to be expected from Republicans, but the leadership core of the Democratic Party also seems to agree that the money is better spent spying on their own country, instead of applying it solve data security and networking problems that would benefit us all.
At best this was a chance to show some value out of the spy programs that the administration claims is keeping us safe. Instead it just furthers my conviction that our spy programs are totally out of control with zero accountability. If nothing else it sends a message to hackers everywhere that the US is an easy Target.
(*) as the Snowden documents make clear, spying activity is focused on nearly all communications - both domestic and foreign.
