I guess it's always cool to learn about top secret stuff that spies do, but I don't get why the specifics of how their search engine works is significant. Am I just missing something?
If the NSA could justify the time and expense to make a search tool, there must be a lot of searching needs... which aren't legal for the NSA to send to the domestic-oriented agencies.
Also, more explicitly-stated details about how powerful "metadata" can be. Obvious to anybody who understands INNER JOIN, but this is still new for most people.
//Of course, I'm sure all this ignoring of warrants and the 4th Amendment, to quote a DOJ lawyer in the recent EFF mess regarding Jewel v NSA, is all for the "national security of this company". (emphasis mine)
The problem is (as it's always been) that they aren't just criminal suspects and they aren't all foreign. But that was the problem whether or not the NSA built a "Google."
It's even more important for us to know what kinds of data about us domestic law enforcement has access to, than it is to know what foreign intelligence has access to.
The power of metadata is implicit. No one at NSA is arguing that metadata isn't powerful, that's the whole reason they're collecting it.
What the NSA is arguing is against the meme that they're trodding roughshod over the Constitution and illegally scooping up data (as they have done in the past). On the contrary, this time they've been very careful to try to remain within the law, and one of those arguments is by pointing out that, according to the law, some types of information are less protected than others.
Greenwald can educate all he wants, but the problem isn't that Americans are stupid or whatever you all seem to think. Americans on the large have been assuming the NSA is doing far worse than what Snowden accused them of, because Americans (on the large) expect that the NSA (or some other branch of the government) is actually able to intercept and listen in on "those jihadis' phone calls and emails".
You're talking about a generation of Americans who grew up listening to PBS stories hounding the Federal government agencies of the Bush and Clinton Administrations for "not connecting the dots", and for having a "lack of imagination", and for "treating terrorism like a law enforcement" problem and for being hamstrung by a bunch of civil liberties protections.
This is by and large the same generation that decided to vote against privacy when they bought into to having their digital lives collectively managed by Google, Apple, Microsoft and Facebook. Explain the low-level bits and bytes to them all you want, but they've already voted on the big picture they want to see.
"Google was also contracted to provide the search technology and servers which makes up “Intellipedia”, a massive, incredibly secure database through which over 100,000 United States spies and intelligence professionals from 16 government agencies share information. And the NSA has purchased numerous servers from Google, utilizing their search technology to analyze and organize massive amounts of secure data all over the world."
At this point I think it safe to assume its the exact same code Google used in 2010, just a bit dumber, since Googles search engine only learns by being used, and since there are far fewer using it, it learns slower.
[1]http://questioneverything2012.wordpress.com/2012/03/14/googl...
So it is news, to those of us who haven't read this blog that makes an unsourced claim.
Besides, from the Greenwald docs, we've seen that Intelipedia is simply a giant Wikimedia instance, nothing fancy.
PRISM is bad enough in US hands, but can you imagine if Oceania/Arstotzka got their hands on the data? (irrelevant countries as to not have to argue that)
Anyway, however damaging it was, my point is that some slides with a bunch of code names, "data-sharing partners", hints at legal justifications and the bureaucracy set up to carry this out, and maybe some high-level descriptions of how the systems work, is a lot different than releasing the actual code that does it, private keys to the servers involved, etc.
It's not like graph theory and data mining are elite subjects only NSA knows, so some high-level descriptions aren't going to help the bad guys much. Handing over complete source code would.