"There was no single person who had a complete technical understanding," The NSA machine: Too big fo

[whttevrr]

The NSA machine: Too big for anyone to understand
http://news.yahoo.com/nsa-machine-too-big-anyone-understand-071323221--politics.html

More yahoo woo for the masses...

WASHINGTON (AP) — The surveillance machine grew too big for anyone to understand.

The National Security Agency set it in motion in 2006 and the vast network of supercomputers, switches and wiretaps began gathering Americans' phone and Internet records by the millions, looking for signs of terrorism.

But every day, NSA analysts snooped on more American phone records than they were allowed to. Some officials searched databases of phone records without even realizing it. Others shared the results of their searches with people who weren't authorized to see them.

It took nearly three years before the government figured out that so much had gone wrong. It took even longer to figure out why.

Newly declassified documents released Tuesday tell a story of a surveillance apparatus so unwieldy and complex that nobody fully comprehended it, even as the government pointed it at the American people in the name of protecting them.

"There was no single person who had a complete technical understanding," government lawyers explained to a federal judge in 2009.

The only people who did not understand what was going on was Congress and The American People. The techno gear heads in charge knew what was going on. The people setting this up new what was going on. It is ridiculous to think government lawyers were being honest when they said: "There was no single person who had a complete technical understanding,"

That is complete Bullshit. The spooks in charge knew exactly what they were creating.

[jsr]

1. Yeah, right.

[whttevrr]

3. Not sure if that is agreement...

or denial?

[jsr]

4. The NSA is full of shit.

[whttevrr]

6. oh ok...

The "yeah, right" was to the premise of the article...

I like this gem:

And when Director of National Intelligence James Clapper was asked whether the government was doing that, he testified, "No."

Ha ha ha... That is completely Bullshittoriffic.

[djean111]

2. Yup. Complete bullshit.

[unblock]

5. "complete technical understanding" -- that's one hell of a big out.

bill gates never had "complete technical understanding" of everything microswift was up to.
steve jobs never had "complete technical understanding" of everything at apple.

plenty of people at nsa no doubt understand exactly what they're doing for all moral and ethical and practical purposes, but perhaps didn't completely understand the math behind the cryptography or the cooling requirements of the computers.

[randome]

7. It's a shame you had to state the obvious!

[hr][font color="blue"][center]You should never stop having childhood dreams.[/center][/font][hr]

[whttevrr]

8. I think "technically" Clapper knew exactly what he was doing...

Saying "not wittingly" was disingenuous at best.

I wonder if that will be the escape hatch used to hide this from public scrutiny:

"No one knew."

[RC]

9. The person behind everything the NSA was and is doing is General Keith Alexander.

He knows exactly what the NSA is doing, because he made it happen.

[whttevrr]

11. Him too

He's been doing this stuff for years... Alexander has the Kuwait Liberation Medal. So, he's been working it for a while from within the Military. But he really got the ball rolling when, as a three star general, he was picked to be the Director of the National Security Agency in 2005.

Both Alexander and Clapper have been building this thing together. Clapper was the Defense Intelligence Agency Director from 1992-1995... And then in 2003 he explained that the WMD's we could not find in Iraq were sent to Syria. He was a general back in 1985...

These guys are two peas in a pod. They know not only where the bodies are buried, but who fucked the corpse... and... they probably have the video on a loop every time they talk to anyone who even questions them.

[rrneck]

10. The best way to fuck somebody over

is to fix it so that they depend on you and then simply do nothing.

[MisterP]

12. that's what Greenspan said about derivatives: they were beyond human understanding

(just the first step in making finance our new god)