re: In NSA-intercepted data, those not targeted far outnumber the foreigners who are

Wow, this is a damning article. Gellman must have done a good job talking things through with Snowden because this is a headshot to each and every one of the NSA's most-frequently used obfuscations:

quote:

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In their classified internal communications, colleagues and supervisors often remind the analysts that PRISM and Upstream collection have a “lower threshold for foreignness ‘standard of proof’?” than a traditional surveillance warrant from a FISA judge, requiring only a “reasonable belief” and not probable cause.

One analyst rests her claim that a target is foreign on the fact that his e-mails are written in a foreign language, a quality shared by tens of millions of Americans. Others are allowed to presume that anyone on the chat “buddy list” of a known foreign national is also foreign.

In many other cases, analysts seek and obtain approval to treat an account as “foreign” if someone connects to it from a computer address that seems to be overseas. “The best foreignness explanations have the selector being accessed via a foreign IP address,” an NSA supervisor instructs an allied analyst in Australia.

Apart from the fact that tens of millions of Americans live and travel overseas, additional millions use simple tools called proxies to redirect their data traffic around the world, for business or pleasure. World Cup fans this month have been using a browser extension called Hola to watch live-streamed games that are unavailable from their own countries. The same trick is routinely used by Americans who want to watch BBC video. The NSA also relies routinely on locations embedded in Yahoo tracking cookies, which are widely regarded by online advertisers as unreliable.

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So even those outrageous numbers the WaPo cited are with the analysts being constantly coached and exhorted to finesse things so they only have a "plausibly deniable" rationale of a target being foreign, not do any kind of honest totality-of-the-evidence test. Talking moonspeak? Foreign. On the buddy list of a foreigner? Foreign. Got a foreign cookie? Foreign. Using a plugin to get around streaming restrictions? Foreign.

These programs need to be ended. I don't care if we don't have "actual" evidence of a person being blackmailed or railroaded. Leaving aside the question of whether the weak-arse oversight of these programs gives any opportunity for such evidence to surface, this is the machinery of a police state and I don't trust it to exist in the hands of a government. It's turn-key totalitarianism once the wrong guy gets elected (assuming he hasn't already.)