Agent of Influence

Exclusive: U.S. Spies Buy Stake in Firm That Monitors Blogs, Tweets | Danger Room | Wired.com

Exclusive: U.S. Spies Buy Stake in Firm That Monitors Blogs, Tweets | Danger Room | Wired.com.

America’s spy agencies want to read your blog posts, keep track of your Twitter updates — even check out your book reviews on Amazon.

Who's in Big Brother's Database? - The New York Review of Books

Who's in Big Brother's Database? - The New York Review of Books.

this library expects few visitors. It's being built by the ultra-secret National Security Agency—which is primarily responsible for "signals intelligence," the collection and analysis of various forms of communication—to house trillions of phone calls, e-mail messages, and data trails: Web searches, parking receipts, bookstore visits, and other digital "pocket litter." Lacking adequate space and power at its city-sized Fort Meade, Maryland, headquarters, the NSA is also completing work on another data archive, this one in San Antonio, Texas, which will be nearly the size of the Alamodome. Just how much information will be stored in these windowless cybertemples? A clue comes from a recent report prepared by the MITRE Corporation, a Pentagon think tank. "As the sensors associated with the various surveillance missions improve," says the report, referring to a variety of technical collection methods, "the data volumes are increasing with a projection that sensor data volume could potentially increase to the level of Yottabytes (1024 Bytes) by 2015."[1] Roughly equal to about a septillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) pages of text, numbers beyond Yottabytes haven't yet been named. Once vacuumed up and stored in these near-infinite "libraries," the data are then analyzed by powerful infoweapons, supercomputers running complex algorithmic programs, to determine who among us may be—or may one day become—a terrorist. In the NSA's world of automated surveillance on steroids, every bit has a history and every keystroke tells a story.

'Terrorist Facebook' – the new weapon against al-Qa'ida - World Politics, World - The Independent

'Terrorist Facebook' – the new weapon against al-Qa'ida - World Politics, World - The Independent.

Intelligence agencies are building up a Facebook-style databank of international terrorists in order to sift through it with complex computer programs aimed at identifying key figures and predicting terrorist attacks before they happen. By analysing the social networks that exist between known terrorists, suspects and even innocent bystanders arrested for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, military intelligence chiefs hope to open a new front in their "war on terror". The idea is to amass huge quantities of intelligence data on people – no matter how obscure or irrelevant – and feed it into computers that are programmed to make associations and connections that would otherwise be missed by human agents, scientists said.

Chinese Spying Claimed in Purchases of NSA Crypto Gear

Chinese Spying Claimed in Purchases of NSA Crypto Gear | Threat Level | Wired.com. A Chinese national was indicted this week for conspiring to violate U.S. export law, following a nearly three-year investigation into his alleged efforts to acquire sensitive military and NSA-encryption gear from eBay and other internet sources. Chi Tong Kuok, of Macau, told Defense Department and Customs investigators that he had been “acting at the direction of officials for the People’s Republic of China,” according to a government affidavit in the case. “Kuak indicated he and PRC officials sought the items to figure out ways to listen to or monitor U.S. government and military communications.”

Don't know about ya'll but it freaks me out that you can buy this stuff online in the first place...the fact that its China doesn't make me feel any better about it

Bush’s Secret NSA Spying May Have Tainted Prosecutions, Report Warns

Bush’s Secret NSA Spying May Have Tainted Prosecutions, Report Warns | Threat Level | Wired.com.

The Justice Department needs to investigate whether the secretiveness of Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program tainted terrorism prosecutions by hiding exculpatory evidence from defendants, an oversight report from five inspectors general warned Friday. The report (.pdf), mandated by Congress, also warned that President’ Bush’s post-9/11 extrajudicial intelligence programs involved unprecedented collection of communications, and that the government needs to be careful about storing and using that data.