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A comment on Ars tests Internet surveillance by spying on an NPR reporter. Parent comment

Re:Ars tests Internet surveillance by spying on an NPR reporter by panarky on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @11:12PM (#7881614)
> That's what the situation in the article was, a hostile WiFi access point.

The point of the article was not the hostile AP, but to simulate a pervasive threat:

  we would create a pint-sized version of the Internet
  surveillance infrastructure used by the National
  Security Agency... Porcello would become our one-man
  equivalent of the NSA’s Special Source Operations
  department
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Re:Ars tests Internet surveillance by spying on an NPR reporter by XorNot on Thursday June 12, 2014 @02:55AM (#7882132)
Which misses the point of NSA surveillance. Ars knew who they were looking at, and could have multiple people look at that one person's history for whatever they wanted.

The broad surveillance of any practical intelligence apparatus only bothers to do that to target actual subjects of interest, and don't have infinite leeway to not produce results while doing it - i.e. if the NSA produces no useful intelligence on Al Qaeda for a few months, they're looking at budget cuts.

Or to put it another way: how many man hours did they expend on this effort, and how many people do they actually think work for the NSA? It's certainly not "millions".

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Re:Ars tests Internet surveillance by spying on an NPR reporter by throwaway6637 on Thursday June 12, 2014 @08:36AM (#7883007)
The NSA does this full-time, with a large staff. They have very elaborate systems designed to automatically pull all this information and organise it into databases for easy lookup.

These guys were manually viewing wireshark dumps. Obviously they're going to spend a lot more time to get the same info when working at such a low level, with no access to any of the automation tools the NSA uses.

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