There is no-doubt in my mind a lot of those programs are still running and new ones have been initiated.
Although The government protects whistleblowers, the government does not really protect whistleblowers that whistleblow government shit.
The NSA is incapable of building the type of mass surveillance infastructure we see today. That infrastructure is built and maintained by private tech companies. The NSA comes along repurposes that already collected data to their own ends.
Further, the NSA's usage of said information has never been linked to any population wide mental health crises, unlike big tech.
There is also a wide range of work the NSA does, and most people working there don't know much beyond their own need to know.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2348156
"AT&T has a fiberoptic splitter copying our data to NSA" (eff.org)" (2011, 200 comments)
However there's also the massive Ogden Utah data storage center run by the NSA and contractors, which has a constant demand for 65 MW of power, I think that counts as mass surveillance infrastructure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center
Seems pretty Orwellian.
Assuming the NSA catches and stores the traffic (i.e. it passed a keyword/subject filter), they still have to break the encryption.
And even if they have devices capable of doing so, they don't have capacity to do so on an unlimited volume of messages.
They're still pushing this stuff today, not surprisingly:
https://www.ctinsider.com/news/article/NSA-director-pushes-C...
> "WASHINGTON (AP) (Jan 12 2023) — A top U.S. intelligence official on Thursday urged Congress to renew sweeping powers granted to American spy agencies to surveil and examine communications, saying they were critical to stopping terrorism, cyberattacks and other threats."
"Other threats" such as what, populist movements unhappy with the increasingly feudalist-aristocratic nature of the United States and the gross corruption seen in Congress and the federal bureaucracy?
At some point, the metadata is (user X talks to SaaS service Y), and then the trail goes private.
If ATT had really pushed back, the NSA would have been hard pressed to install and run tapping equipment. And that's on hardline voice, where CALEA obviously applies. But as far as I know ATT didn't really fight, once they were legally covered from liability.
The modern large scale cloud or social providers are younger companies, have fewer government ties, and (critically) have worldwide business.
I would automatically assume they all have data sharing agreements with the NSA, as a maximal threat assumption, but as a likely threat I expect it'd be a lot harder for the NSA to co-opt them.
I.e. why the NSA instead chose to tap Google's private fiber between their data centers
You still think that the "security" certificates make you secure ? that s in https stands for security ?
Why would a spy agency collect TB of data without a mean to decrypt it ?
And the NSA is doing that because they can break a percentage of it, or anticipate they can in the future.
And it's order of exabytes of data.
This is false, the snowden releases showed they have extensive infrastructure that aggregates data from many different sources.
At the end of the day, worldwide profit scales systems faster than even national security dollars.
Granted, they do not snoop on you to the maximum extent the hardware of these devices allow. But, take a look at [0]. Unless you are one of the few people who goes out of their way to limit tracking, do you think that the NSA would be able to get that detailed tracking of everyone's movements.
And this is just the obvious part (which Google is nice enough to share with its users as a feature). Big tech companies have also built detailed models of most people's interests; which is simply not possible without the large amount of data that comes from people actually interacting with them.
All of the NSA's dragnet surveillance is built on the back of private industry, and works because that private industry has convinced people to participate in it.
The NSA is a big old bitch,
"so are your fangs and VCs"
says the crowd who has the itch
for cool projects but sees
all really as prostitution. Stitch
up the foul mouth hey, one who pees
in the water is bound to filth drink,
work, make, grow rich but don't think.Yes. When we elect our officials we grant them significant power. We have rules they must abide by to protect us from that power (I.e. using this data to interfere with elections to continue/advance their power.)
This is substantially different than private industry. Don’t get me wrong, surveillance capitalism is its own shade of gray. But the government laundering away constitutional rights through collaboration with private industry and protecting themselves from prosecution for their crimes by labeling these collaborations a state secret?
Between their clandestine organizations, their militaries, and their law enforcement - the government is capable of perpetuating more crimes against humanity than their private industry counterparts.
Also the scope of the NSA is much more broad and you'll also have the possibility to work on stuff that could be closer to ops stuff as well.
For example I don't think palantir works on shit like stuxnet or deploying stuxnet.
Last I read about palantir it was some boring ass search graph relationship thing.
You mean they don't help prevent a hostile state from developing nuclear weapons? All withou causing anything approaching the collateral damage (and risk of open war) that a traditional attack on infrastructure would cause?
Setting aside the fact that the NSA work sounds a lot more interesting from a technical perspective [0], a lot of people would find the work far more fulfilling than convincing people to buy widgets they don't need.
[0] Especially considering that the day to day work of working for a large government organization is far more boring, even without the extra headache that comes with working with classified materials.
I think the parent comment fully agrees with you on this. Their whole reply is just saying that despite paying more, Palantir isn't nearly as layoff-proof as NSA, and you don't get to work on such a wide range of "cool" things (such as stuxnet) at Palantir either.
Stuxnet was developed in a way that Palantir or other people outside the ultra secrete government cyber weapons labs, could have been contracted to work on parts of it, government may have merely assembled parts of code sourced from private industry to create the malware.
I'm not saying that they are going to subcontract out everything or the important things, but their advantage is being able to leverage private industry for specific knowledge and expertise.
Saying that though, working for govt in any form comes with its own risks. https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Document:NSA_GCHQ_and_the_Death_... https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6585263/Damning-new... https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Chelsea_Manning https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Julian_Assange
Sometimes being in the public spotlight is the less dangerous path, which these NSA jobs are not. https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Bill_Clinton
Accidents happen. Prison happens. Intelligence gathering comes in all shapes and sizes, but one thing is for certain, it was previously thought being on the right side of the law was a psychological advantage, its not any more, it could be extremely risky. This is the era of psychological warfare, and the best candidates are those who volunteer for their trauma as any Emergency Response (Police/Fire/Ambulance) person knows.
Psychological trauma is a life long condition with no visible scars.
How you survive working for the state largely depends on your own intelligence, but you can bet your bottom dollar you will be experimented in ways that science dictates that subjects are not too be made aware of any said experiment.
Sort of true, but not exactly true. Thomas Drake was a whistleblower. Snowden might have started out as a whistleblower (without going through the proper process), but has released a lot of detailed information beyond what is necessary to be a whistleblower, which could even possiblt cause net harm.
Edit: why disagree?
Then almost a year to the date of the first publishing of the Snowden docs, along came heartbleed, which clearly showed the Snowden documents were legitimate. As more technical leaning documents came out, they also proved it. Without those documents though, we'd be told it was all a fairy tale.
For the NSA I'm sure you'll literally be able to look up personal details on anyone.
NSA is waaay worse then Google. Or waaay cooler. Depends on your perspective.
The government does shady stuff, but would you really have more trust in a corporation?
I have less trust for the NSA and CIA because of past infractions. For example how the CIA was selling coke to the US to fund their programs. That's next level shit that not even a corpo will do.
I think it's still easier to rationalize working for the CIA than Purdue, and easier to work on mass-surveillance for the NSA than for Google. National security vs private yachts. I mean, I'd understand if you say you wouldn't work for the CIA or NSA because you don't believe in their approaches to things, but I doubt you'd say "... but I have no problem writing software to push more oxy into rural communities and kill a few tens of thousands citizens a year as long as my bonus comes through".
This is contrary to everything I’ve heard about their internal controls, especially after Snowden. He was able to get as much as he could because he was a trusted administrator, and that was reportedly tightened significantly afterwards.
Without a warrant? That would attract all sorts of creeps and stalkers to the organisation.
If the paycheck is ok
But either way, it's the same thing.