It’s common knowledge the NSA collects plenty of data on suspected terrorists as well as ordinary citizens but the agency also has algorithms in place to filter out information that doesn’t need to be collected or stored for further analysis, such as spam emails. Now Alice Truong reports that during operations in Afghanistan after 9/11, the US was able to analyze laptops formerly owned by Taliban members and according to NSA officer Michael Wertheimer discovered an email written in English found on the computers contained a purposely spammy subject line: “CONSOLIDATE YOUR DEBT.” According to Wertheimer, the email was sent to and from nondescript addresses that were later confirmed to belong to combatants. "It is surely the case that the sender and receiver attempted to avoid allied collection of this operational message by triggering presumed “spam” filters (PDF)." From a surveillance perspective, Wertheimer writes that this highlights the importance of filtering algorithms. Implementing them makes parsing huge amounts of data easier, but it also presents opportunities for someone with a secret to figure out what type of information is being tossed out and exploit the loophole.
(Score: 1) by Buck Feta on Friday January 16 2015, @11:56PM
And vice versa
- fractious political commentary goes here -
(Score: 2) by Jeremiah Cornelius on Saturday January 17 2015, @12:40AM
Terrorists become a statistically NON EXISTENT political fiction.
http://digbysblog.blogspot.fr/2015/01/a-little-welcome-perspective-on-threat.html [blogspot.fr]
The REICHSTAG is BURNING!
You're betting on the pantomime horse...
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Sunday January 18 2015, @07:56AM
Perhaps it's about selective attacks and possible future asymmetrical operations?
And of course it will make it easy for some organizations to get powers by law they shouldn't have.