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NSA deletes hundreds of millions of call records over privacy violations
The NSA unfortunately has a long history of violating privacy rules, although this time the agency might not be entirely to blame. The NSA is deleting hundreds of millions of call and text message data records (collected since 2015) after learning of "technical irregularities" that led to receiving records it wasn't supposed to obtain under the USA Freedom Act. General counsel Glenn Gerstell told the New York Times in an interview that "one or more" unnamed telecoms had responded to data requests for targets by sending logs that included not just the relevant data, but records for people who hadn't been in contact with the targets. As it was "infeasible" to comb through all the data and find just the authorized data, the NSA decided to wipe everything.
[...] The companies involved have "addressed" the cause of the problem for data going forward, the NSA said.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday July 03 2018, @02:10AM (1 child)
If the population were less polarized on a few key issues, the voter's power might have some meaning. Those polarized issues are brought to the fore, and other more important issues are kept somewhere backstage. Out of sight, and out of mind is the best place for them, from the politician's point of view.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday July 03 2018, @12:59PM
They're polarized by design. When you sift out the political jargon, the talking points, the propaganda, they hype, then the vast majority of Americans are not very far apart at all in terms of what they value and what their goals are, because those are rooted in a common set of material circumstances.
It is useful for the power elites to expand upon trifling differences to create the illusion of contested elections. When the dust from the election pageant settles, they calmly carry on and continue looting the national wealth and siphoning off the productivity of regular people who have skills and know how to do stuff. It's the best scam in history.
To begin to change that, it's necessary to abandon the entire raft of divisive language the power elites employ.
Washington DC delenda est.