So the question is: did they pass a law to allow data collection because of 9/11 and other attacks, or did they pass a law because they wanted the NSA to be able to collect this data using computer systems they had been planning for years, and used those attacks as a pretext?
It started long, long before 2001. Here is a 2000 press release from the ACLU about global surveillance done by Echelon, which had already been ongoing for years (back when the ACLU cared about privacy issues):
https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/privacy-advocates-concer...
By 1999 privacy advocates at already gotten together for an official "jam Echelon day".
>It was the latest in a long line of apparently futile online protest movements. On Thursday October 21 1999, internet users were urged to drop trigger words into their email so as to overwhelm Echelon, the massive surveillance project which is said to keep track of all electronic communications into and out of the USA, the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
https://techmonitor.ai/technology/did_jam_echelon_day_do_mor...
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20001018103147/http://www.echelo...
They must be storing either a subset or only partial metadata.
Nothing is unlimited, especially inflation. The idea of a "budget" when the FED can (and does) create trillions of dollars out of thin air with a few keystrokes is antiquated. They can - and do - devote whatever resources they desire for "national security".
Hell, if I was a _benevolent_ surveillance program, I'd probably run routine searches for illegal stuff on YouTube, both to find it myself, and to make sure YouTube's tripwires are working.
There is so much low-hanging fruit in terms of "interesting secrets per byte"
Like, I could believe all SMS messages are stored for a year or so.
Some random source says, "Over 6 billion texts are sent every day".
If a text is about 140 characters, and you use a dumb image classifier to transcribe photos as "Nude woman", "nude man", "dick pic", "image macro", "guns", etc., that's only about 1 TB per day, right?
365 TB to keep all US text messages for a year? Maybe my source is wrong. That sounds low. But, it's just text. Maybe it's right.
In fact, the upper bound for all US keyboard input for a year must be below 4.6 petabytes.
(350 million people typing 365 days a year, 16 hours a day, 40 words per minute, 1 bit of entropy per character after compression, 8 bits per word)
No different than google search results. The accuracy of the 7th page of results just doesn’t matter.
Edit: anyone downvoting want to comment on why this is implausible or not noteworthy to mention? It was a topic of discussion at the time.
I searched for "thailand hard drive shortage nsa" and only got...
2013 Nov, Backblaze's annual hard drive report still only blamed the flooding: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/farming-hard-drives-2-years-a...
2015, Tech Power-Up has a story about NSA malware hidden in hard drive firmware: https://www.techpowerup.com/209925/nsa-hides-spying-backdoor...
https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/li1pep/a_global...
What do you mean with this, specifically? Do you mean that China has a more comprehensive data collection apparatus, that the Chinese government has easier access to commercially collected data, or maybe that they exert their control more overtly than the US?
It's called not paying to bombard them with great replacement conspiracy theories all for a decade and instead paying twice as many teachers as well as getting dedicated mental health staff.
They do. Here are a couple recent examples:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Tucson_shooting https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_baseball_shoot...
Adjacently, to make the point: we warehouse 1000s or rape kits but don't bother to process them. Like, wtf?
Big Data completely flips the problem of investigation. Instead of identifying suspects, chasing leads, gathering evidence, and verifying alibis, with Big Data you just rule out everyone who does have an alibi. Leaving only those who don't have an alibi, thereby revealing the perpetrators.
It's been a while since I've actively cared about protecting privacy. So I don't know if any one's talking about how Big Data impacts legal concepts (balances of concerns) hammered out over the centuries. Like what is reasonable doubt and presumption of innocence when prosecutors can prove that every one else has an alibi?
When I tried to talk about this stuff with other privacy advocates, presumably savvy about policy and whatnot, they'd look at me like I'm paranoid schizophrenic. So if the experts are still coming up to speed, it'll take that much longer for the policy maker, much less the general public, to become aware.
The US has a much wider intellegence reach and surveillance, not only on our own citizens but on the worlds.
I'd call it a decentrailized surveillance system --- very robust against any attempt to dismantle it.
The NSA isn't "vacuuming up all the metadata and a good fraction of the content from the main nodes." It does full take in some countries with national security interest and collects data to or from some endpoints outside the US known to belong to foreigners with a court order.
We know all of this from the documents Snowden leaked and the documents the government declassified.
https://www.quora.com/What-percent-of-law-enforcement-search...
> "Although the litigation is ongoing, we are now making public the records that CBP, ICE, the U.S. Secret Service, the U.S. Coast Guard, and several offices within DHS Headquarters have provided us to date."
The NSA is still vacuuming up all the metadata and a good fraction of the content from the main nodes where it put those fiber-optic cable splitters on the main trunk lines what, 20 years ago or so? Under the Patriot Act provisions, pushed through Congress in late October 2001 wasn't it? Just a few days after the Senate got shut down by those anthrax letter attacks sent to Daschle and Leahy (no, it wasn't Bruce Ivins).
Then you've got the backdoors into Google and Apple, the whole PRISM thing... I doubt they've shut any of that down. See Yasha Levine's "Surveillance Valley" for more on that.
https://yashalevine.com/surveillance-valley
It's not quite China yet, but I'm pretty sure that when our politicians and bureaucrats and their corporate masters look at China's system, their main emotion is one of envy.