None of this is a real surprise.
In 2010, several months after escaping from the US, I was lecturing in a Data Mining intenational computer science conference.
As it turned out, the conference was heavily sponsored by IBM. The IBM rep, was the Director of IBM Research Center in Ireland. He was former Russian math professor. His specialty - Graph Theory. His project, which he described only in vague terms, was applying state of the art mathematical tools for analyzing Big Data from social networks and other communication sources.
Others in the same conference were presenting research based on analysis of Facebook chats and messages, which were provided to them by Facebook for "research purposes".
Anybody with brains had to suspect that all these people were involved, one way or another with the security apparatus.
On the other hand, there were some presenations from the other side: My lectures were on data mining of court and prison records in the United States, documenting the corruption of the state and federal courts and abuse of the people through state organized computer crimes. A guy from Poland detailed data mining of police communications... :)
JZ
The NSA Admits It Analyzes More People's Data Than Previously Revealed
AP
As an aside during testimony on Capitol Hill today, a National Security Agency representative rather casually indicated that the government looks at data from a universe of far, far more people than previously indicated.
Chris Inglis, the agency's deputy director, was one of several government representatives—including from the FBI and the office of the Director of National Intelligence—testifying before the House Judiciary Committee this morning. Most of the testimony largely echoed previous testimony by the agencies on the topic of the government's surveillance, including a retread of the same offered examples for how the Patriot Act and Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act had stopped terror events.
But Inglis' statement was new. Analysts look "two or three hops" from terror suspects when evaluating terror activity, Inglis revealed. Previously, the limit of how surveillance was extended had been describedas two hops. This meant that if the NSA were following a phone metadata or web trail from a terror suspect, it could also look at the calls from the people that suspect has spoken with—one hop. And then, the calls that second person had also spoken with—two hops. Terror suspect to person two to person three. Two hops. And now: A third hop.
Think of it this way. Let's say the government suspects you are a terrorist and it has access to your Facebook account. If you're an American citizen, it can't do that currently (with certain exceptions)—but for the sake of argument. So all of your friends, that's one hop. Your friends' friends, whether you know them or not—two hops. Your friends' friends' friends, whoever they happen to be, are that third hop. That's a massive group of people that the NSA apparently considers fair game.
For a sense of scale, researchers at the University of Milan found in 2011 that everyone on the Internet was, on average, 4.74 steps away from anyone else. The NSA explores relationships up to three of those steps. (See our conversation with the ACLU's Alex Abdo on this.)
Inglis' admission didn't register among the members of Congress present, but immediately resonated with privacy advocates online.
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