During the “Arab Spring” (what a loathsome, patronizing, attitude we express!) the US Government repeatedly socialized ideas about how Twitter, etc, were important to helping anti-government protests, i.e.:
The Obama administration, while insisting it is not meddling in Iran, yesterday confirmed it had asked Twitter to remain open to help anti-government protesters. [guardian]
Does anyone still believe that it’s “just metadata” that the NSA is collecting and sharing with the FBI?
Michael Flynn doesn’t.
As the police and intelligence agencies continue to collect more and more information, it’s all OK because they’re good custodians of that information: they keep it secure where hackers can’t get at it and publish it, and you need clearances to get at it.
Yeah, right.
The NSA’s data-pile represents a retro-scope that can be used to investigate anyone backward in time. In an earlier posting, I described how it can be useful in political hit-jobs against anyone with even a ghost of a skeleton in their closet. Guess what?
Amy, the perky robo-shill, called me again yesterday. This time I actually listened to the pitch.
Yesterday I discussed the retro-scope of information-gathering[1] and I probably should have mentioned that President Obama – along with commuting Chelsea Manning’s sentence – handed the citizens of the US a great big “F.U.” Just before leaving office he quietly changed how the NSA is allowed to share information, considerably expanding the power of the intelligence apparatus.
In an email, I am asked:
Assuming that the current administration is completely unaccountable to law, is it *technically* possible for them to data mine the electronic communications of their political opponents?
Today, for no reason other than curiousity, I submitted a pair of FOIA requests.
There’s another nice example of attribution, in a recent piece by Brian Krebs [krebsonsecurity] “Who is Anna-Senpai the Mirai Worm Author?” I’m not going to walk through it in detail, because Krebs has already done that very well.
It’s a good example of how to do attribution of an attack; the $30+billion/year US intelligence community should be able to do as good a job as a blogger like Krebs, don’t you think?
Obama +1
I’m happy about this. Barack Obama, you complicated, inconsistent, unamerican, brilliant, interesting man. I voted for you the first time because you said you’d close gitmo and get the US out of Iraq and Afghanistan. I didn’t vote for you the second time because you expanded the drone killings, continued to erode the war powers resolution, and destroyed Libya. You were barely the lesser evil. Now, you’ll be missed and that’s a statement about how bad it’s going to get.