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posted by Fnord666 on Monday January 16 2017, @01:08PM   Printer-friendly
from the now-they're-all-watching-you dept.

If you thought government surveillance was bad already, it just got worse. A lot worse.

[T]he Obama administration on Thursday announced new rules that will let the NSA share vast amounts of private data gathered without warrant, court orders or congressional authorization with 16 other agencies, including the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Agency, and the Department of Homeland Security.

The new rules allow employees doing intelligence work for those agencies to sift through raw data collected under a broad, Reagan-era executive order that gives the NSA virtually unlimited authority to intercept communications abroad. Previously, NSA analysts would filter out information they deemed irrelevant and mask the names of innocent Americans before passing it along.

[...] Executive Order 12333, often referred to as "twelve triple-three," has attracted less debate than congressional wiretapping laws, but serves as authorization for the NSA's most massive surveillance programs — far more than the NSA's other programs combined. Under 12333, the NSA taps phone and internet backbones throughout the world, records the phone calls of entire countries, vacuums up traffic from Google and Yahoo's data centers overseas, and more.

In 2014, The Intercept revealed that the NSA uses 12333 as a legal basis for an internal NSA search engine that spans more than 850 billion phone and internet records and contains the unfiltered private information of millions of Americans.

[...] But this massive database inevitably includes vast amount of American's communications — swept up when they speak to people abroad, when they go abroad themselves, or even if their domestic communications are simply routed abroad. That's why access was previously limited to data that had already been screened to remove unrelated information and information identifying U.S. persons. The new rules still ostensibly limit access to authorized foreign intelligence and counterintelligence purposes — not ordinary law enforcement purposes — and require screening before they are more widely shared. But privacy activists are skeptical.


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  • (Score: 4, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 16 2017, @01:27PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 16 2017, @01:27PM (#454363)

    Trump will issue a day one executive order undoing this because he respects Americans' right to privacy.

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  • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 16 2017, @01:33PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 16 2017, @01:33PM (#454364)

    I want basic income and a pony. Burger Time me, G!

    • (Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 16 2017, @04:12PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 16 2017, @04:12PM (#454399)

      Then go get a job at Mcdonalds, you'll have your basic income and a discount on burgers.

  • (Score: 2) by butthurt on Tuesday January 17 2017, @03:48AM

    by butthurt (6141) on Tuesday January 17 2017, @03:48AM (#454707) Journal

    Recent news stories have portrayed Mr. Trump in an adversarial relationship to the U.S. intelligence community. It's conceivable that he might attempt to rein them in.

    However, I recall an incident in which he made public the mobile number for a senator:

    Speaking in front of hundreds at a rally in South Carolina on Tuesday, Donald Trump read a number he said people could use to reach South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham's private cell phone.

    -- http://edition.cnn.com/2015/07/21/politics/donald-trump-lindsey-graham-cell-phone/index.html [cnn.com]

    After 2016 presidential candidate Sen. Lindsey Graham, (R-S.C.), said fellow GOP candidate Donald Trump should "stop being a jackass," Trump hit back. During a campaign rally in South Carolina, Trump responded by reading Graham's phone number out loud.

    -- https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2015/07/21/yes-donald-trump-gave-everyone-lindsey-grahams-real-cell-phone-number-and-hes-not-sorry/ [washingtonpost.com]

    It's conceivable that he may use the trove of data the intelligence apparatus has about all of us to embarrass other critics in a similarly childish manner.