The NSA watches you poop.

The National Security Agency's headquarters in Ft. Meade, Md., will go dark if a cohort of Maryland lawmakers has its way.

Eight Republicans in the 141-member Maryland House of Delegates introduced legislation Thursday that would deny the electronic spy agency "material support, participation or assistance in any form" from the state, its political subdivisions or companies with state contracts.

The bill would deprive NSA facilities water and electricity carried over public utilities, ban the use of NSA-derived evidence in state courts and prevent state universities from partnering with the NSA on research.

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A U.S. law firm advising Indonesia's government on trade issues was spied on by a foreign government, according to a new top secret document released by former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden.

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chaos_sl said:

Or it is an intelligence partnership that goes back to WW2 and you don't really have the context to understand what that means.

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One option, the insiders say, would be to rely on phone companies themselves - such as AT&T and Verizon - keep hold of the collected data themselves, rather than pass it in its raw form to the NSA. Security services would then request searches of call records considering specific phone numbers, eventually working with only the most contentious or suspicious data, rather than keeping hold of every piece of it.

However, while believed to be technically viable, and popular with some politicians, the strategy is said to be unpopular with the operators themselves, fearful of what legal responsibilities they'd hold.


Another scheme could see the FBI taken on the role of holding the raw data, or another government agency. Suggestions that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court could be the right party met with push-back from the judges themselves, though, who are said to be loath to expand the court's duties.

The third possibility is a completely external company to be responsible for the raw data. Although that was one suggestion in Obama's speech, privacy advocates have complained that it would simply shift the intrusive data collection problem elsewhere, not address it.

Obama also mentioned the potential for no longer using phone surveillance of this type, though pointed out that the implications of that were not fully understood.

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One of the many pressing stories that remains to be told from the Snowden archive is how western intelligence agencies are attempting to manipulate and control online discourse with extreme tactics of deception and reputation-destruction. It's time to tell a chunk of that story, complete with the relevant documents.

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Among the core self-identified purposes of JTRIG are two tactics1) to inject all sorts of false material onto the internet in order to destroy the reputation of its targets; and (2) to use social sciences and other techniques to manipulate online discourse and activism to generate outcomes it considers desirable.To see how extremist these programs are, just consider the tactics they boast of using to achieve those ends: "false flag operations" (posting material to the internet and falsely attributing it to someone else), fake victim blog posts (pretending to be a victim of the individual whose reputation they want to destroy), and posting "negative information" on various forums. Here is one illustrative list of tactics from the latest GCHQ document we're publishing today:

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these GCHQ documents are the first to prove that a major western government is using some of the most controversial techniques to disseminate deception online and harm the reputations of targets. Under the tactics they use, the state is deliberately spreading lies on the internet about whichever individuals it targets, including the use of what GCHQ itself calls "false flag operations" and emails to people's families and friends. Who would possibly trust a government to exercise these powers at all, let alone do so in secret, with virtually no oversight, and outside of any cognizable legal framework?

Then there is the use of psychology and other social sciences to not only understand, but shape and control, how online activism and discourse unfolds. Today's newly published document touts the work of GCHQ's "Human Science Operations Cell," devoted to "online human intelligence" and "strategic influence and disruption":

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Spoiler

it turns out that the /r/news mod /u/BipolarBear0 who has been deleting all the instances of this story has previously been caught running a voting brigade to get anti-Semitic content upvoted on /r/conspiracy to discredit the sub. A fact which he admitted to me in another thread just a few minutes ago (he claims he was doing an "experiment"...)

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Britain's surveillance agency GCHQ, with aid from the US National Security Agency, intercepted and stored the webcam images of millions of internet users not suspected of wrongdoing, secret documents reveal.

GCHQ files dating between 2008 and 2010 explicitly state that a surveillance program codenamed Optic Nerve collected still images of Yahoo webcam chats in bulk and saved them to agency databases, regardless of whether individual users were an intelligence target or not.

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