You are free to see harm in these statements but telling me they are always meant as harmful as you mentioned is your own negative reflection. Not mine or ours, we are free to have our own interpretation as well.
Honestly, yes. According to some random infographic I came across, americans use ~2 million GB (2PB) of data per minute. We'll round down and call that one EB per day. So round down again and call it 300 EB per year (a high estimate would be 1K EB, or 1 YB). That's more than the entire global output of disk storage annually, and the NSA aren't the only ones who want hard drives.
Keep in mind that much (most?) of that data is encrypted in transit, so targeting exactly which data they want is not always possible.
Keep in mind there are side channel attacks that let you guess passwords typed via SSH. I wouldn't be even a little surprised if the side channel leakage of most Internet traffic zooming around via TLS is good enough that the NSA can sort it pretty easily. This is all theorizing on my part, though.
What we do know is they can probably collect a huge amount of useful traffic and store it for a relatively short, but useful amount of time (weeks, probably). Kind of like a ring buffer. Systems are always sifting and flagging and saving some portion of what they are collecting, including raw traffic. Also consider that there are lots of ways of unmasking the basic metadata of the streams through any number of leaky things happening in the web browser.
This traffic is collected in an un-targeted fashion. They just promise (pinky swear) they don't look at it without a search warrant. Then a search program executes and they retrieve it from the data stores. Think about that legal theory, because that is exactly what Michael Hayden testified to. I don't know if it is just an age gap or something else, but I think people on HN are not aware of the extreme data collection the NSA performs and the ongoing threat this is, and continues to be, to privacy.
Anyhow, I think the generation after millennials should be called the surveillance generation, because it's all tracked. I just can't understand the skepticism at what the NSA is doing because of some lazy back of the envelope math. Anyway, this isn't really targeted at you as a reply, but this whole thread... there was a time when this sort of skepticism was basically the norm in technical circles with little doubt. Now I see it eroding in general tech circles.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)
https://www.eff.org/nsa-spying
“””The undisputed documents show that AT&T installed a fiberoptic splitter at its facility at 611 Folsom Street in San Francisco that makes copies of all emails web browsing and other Internet traffic to and from AT&T customers and provides those copies to the NSA. This copying includes both domestic and international Internet activities of AT&T customers. As one expert observed, “this isn’t a wiretap, it’s a country-tap.”
Secret government documents, published by the media in 2013, confirm the NSA obtains full copies of everything that is carried along major domestic fiber optic cable networks.”””
This is utter nonsense posted by somebody who has the reading level of a Snowden or a Greenwald. There is no such document. Can you point me to one?
That you pointed to PRISM as an example, a system that processes communications from specifically targeted foreign individuals already obtained by the FBI, shows you haven't read any of the documents.
Yes because this claim is preposterous. You don't even need a napkin to show this is impossible.
> This is "common knowledge" in information security circles.
The "common knowledge" in Internet industry circles is that Snowden misinterpreted several documents and made wild claims about what they said.
> Go look up the battles the EFF has fought with the NSA about their data collection practices.
Snowden's documents showed that the EFF arguments against about what was happening at AT&T were unfounded. The documents showed that instead of copying everything, they filtered to traffic to or from certain foreign targets outside the US.
Then either you have the same reading errors as Snowden, or you haven't looked at the actual documents instead of Greenwald's incompetent reporting of them.