12 True Tales of Creepy NSA Cyberstalking

I think we all knew this was going to happen at some point.

Wired Has actual government papers.

The NSA has released some details of 12 incidents in which analysts used their access to America’s high-tech surveillance infrastructure to spy on girlfriends, boyfriends, and random people they met in social settings. It’s a fascinating look at what happens when the impulse that drives average netizens to look up long-ago ex-lovers on Facebook is mated with the power to fire up a wiretap with a few keystrokes.

Occupy America

We have “SIGINT,” which is how spy agencies refer to collecting signals intelligence, or communications, and “HUMINT” for human intelligence, or spying. And now we have "LOVEINT," which is how NSA officers read the emails of love interests. It doesn't happen a lot, the NSA told the Wall Street Journal, but often enough that there is a word for it.

"The “LOVEINT” examples constitute most episodes of willful misconduct by NSA employees, officials said.

In the wake of revelations last week that NSA had violated privacy rules on nearly 3,000 occasions in a one-year period, NSA Chief Compliance Officer John DeLong emphasized in a conference call with reporters last week that those errors were unintentional. He did say that there have been “a couple” of willful violations in the past decade. He said he didn’t have the exact figures at the moment.

NSA said in a statement Friday that there have been “very rare” instances of willful violations of any kind in the past decade, and none have violated key surveillance laws. “NSA has zero tolerance for willful violations of the agency’s authorities” and responds “as appropriate.”

The LOVEINT violations involved overseas communications, officials said, such as spying on a partner or spouse. In each instance, the employee was punished either with an administrative action or termination."

WSJ

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.), who chairs the Senate intelligence committee, said the NSA told her committee about a set of “isolated cases” that have occurred about once a year for the last 10 years, where NSA personnel have violated NSA procedures.

She said “in most instances” the violations didn’t involve an American’s personal information. She added that she’s seen no evidence that any of the violations involved the use of NSA’s domestic surveillance infrastructure, which is governed by a law known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

reply to post by ATSmediaPRO


The more power you give individuals (who are protected by the blanket of being a government "employee") the more likely they are to abuse that power. The solution is to forbid these types of powers outright.

The reason for the war on ________. (Fill in the blank) are because of the power rising to unofficial groups. The solution is not to create mirror sanctioned groups that have unlimited power, but to eliminate these types of groups altogether.

Tax evaders and tax collectors - equally corrupt.
Drug traffickers and drug enforcement agents - equally corrupt.

This theme is spread throughout many industry and many governmental organizations. The more power, the more it draws the type of people that are seduced by it.

An ironclad example is the church. There is a reason why so many pedophiles become priests. Not because they care about god, but because they are lured to a position of power that automatically entrusts them with one's children. Simple as that.

I cannot emphasize this enough.

Think about it.

Speak to tax collectors off the record. Learn about how they get a thrill out of nabbing someone for tax violations when they themselves don't even know the tax code. Or the one's that do, manipulate it for their own means so they pay no taxes.

Find the ones that file audits on people they don't like.

There are professional lives and there are personal lives and a very, very small percentage know how to keep those two separate.

It doesn't surprise me at all that people would use these sweeping powers to spy on family, friends and enemies. When you have that kind of power at your finger tips, it's hard no to wield it.

Nothing is secret unless you keep it upstairs indefinitely...

reply to post by boncho


we need Honor codes for people. and actual reckoning for white collar crimes.

People in power must think Freedom first, and act with Integrity.

NSA, and such, none who work there truly appreciate our forgotten rights and freedom. If I was aksed to do that job, my answer would be " what?, no way dude that is un-American, I guess next we will be doing checkpoints? erm, nevermind"

Ah. Well. Let's see.

Long ago and far away, there was a demonstration of the system's newly acquired ability to accurately spot some low but reasonable number of people by vocal data. That is, whilst it was listening to everyone on phones and radio communications and whatnot, it could also now spend some spare cycles thinking about what it was hearing. And for a few thousand lucky recipients, it could listen for things like voice prints, word inflections, word choices, sentence structure, accent and so on. From that, it gets a "fingerprint" of your speech beyond simple vocal tract models. So to a pretty fair degree of accuracy, it can listen for certain people, and raise a flag when it hears you, to a programmable degree of certainty.

So, at this demo, they picked a set of persons with a very distinctive voice. Select members of the NSC were there, and as part of the spiel were told something like "Now, we've instructed the system to listen for ten prominent US senators. If, during this demo, one of them uses a telephone or radio transmitter that we can receive, the system will alert us and relay the message content through these speakers. If not, well at the end of the demo we'll select one of you, and let you make a phone call out to someone" The demo went on, explaining how the system's new abilities worked, and suddenly a monitor lit up with the likeness of a really well known Senator from Boston, with some nice data about likelihood it was him and the location of the phone he was using. And through the speakers overhead, the Senator called a Washington call girl service and set up a date with a hooker.

I'm told it is legendary. I guess it falls into "loveint".

That said, I have worked in an office long ago where we were able to get a remarkably good feed of ship-to-shore links from oil rigs and Merchant Marine boats, we put it on the background sound system as entertainment about 10% of the time. After they'd been out there a while, it went from sort of a redneck reality show in real time to "PORNINT". I can see the attraction - if I could tap phone calls with impunity, I'd just fish around for some great phone lines and listen in for entertainment.

reply to post by Bedlam


Are you sure that wasn't a faked demo just for that purpose?

Not that they couldn't do what you said but that the offending conversation happened to come up at the right time (vs pre-recorded for the demo).

It serves a secondary purpose, impressing the blackmail power the NSA has to the audience (in a conveniently plausible-deniable way) in case they weren't convinced.

reply to post by mbkennel


Well, it could have been, I suppose. Legend also had it that Ol' Ted was not amused. You have to figure it's going to get back to him.